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A Champion in the Fight Against Testing Standards
By Jay Mathews Those of us who support the movement to measure educational standards with tests have had a distinct advantage in debates over this issue. Our opponents often do not know much about our principal source of concern--poor kids and their schools. The leading critics of high-stakes tests often live in places like Scarsdale, N.Y., some distance from inner city schools. Although the anti-testers do not actually think of the issue this way, it has been easy--an old debating trick--to portray them as rich people trying to protect their little darlings from a few annoying multiple choice tests when those same tests are vital in keeping track of school progress--or lack of progress--in low-income neighborhoods. Well, no more cheap victories for us. The movement against standardized testing has finally found a champion who cannot be dismissed as a country club obstructionist. She is Deborah Meier, a fierce opponent of standardized tests who is also founder of the Central Park East School in East Harlem, co-principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, and one of the most knowledgeable and innovative inner city educators the country has ever seen. The Better Late Than Never Book Club--my lonely effort to promote worthy, if often obscure, writing on education--hereby announces as its latest selection Meier's new book, "In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization" (Beacon: $23). The BLTN club usually stumbles across a good book long after it has been published, because the president and recording secretary is such a slow reader. But I was looking for a book like this, and Meier caught my attention (just five weeks after the pub date) by putting a very important word, "trust," in the title. It has been clear to me for some time that the fierce argument over how to help our worst schools arises from a failure of confidence in educators. Meier herself deserves some blame for this. A generation ago, most Americans who worried about schools accepted the notion that inner city and rural teachers were doing their best, but could not be expected to do much with low-income kids. The assumption was that until their parents got better jobs and their families grew smaller and less stressful, they would not be able to learn as quickly or as well as their suburban counterparts. But then we began to hear of educators who had made remarkable headway with such children without waiting for a social revolution. There were, among others, Marva Collins in Chicago, Jaime Escalante in East Los Angeles, and Meier in New York City. Meier reduced our trust of ordinary teachers by raising our expectations. With a few other rebel teachers and administrators, she created small, intimate learning communities for Harlem kids and succeeded in preparing large numbers of them for college. She joined with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform to bring the idea to several other New York schools, and helped start a revolution in small urban schools that--with a big new dose of money from computer magnate Bill Gates--is changing education in several cities. Even at 71, Meier is dealing with kids every day at Mission Hill Elementary, a pilot school in the heavily minority Roxbury section of Boston. As she says in her book, the more she sees of the effects of standardized testing on schools like hers, the more she loathes the idea of politicians setting school standards and enforcing them with tests. Among her other talents, Meier is probably the best writer among working educators today. She is always honest, even when it weakens her case, and that is why I find her new book so irresistible and so troubling for those of us who think standards and standardized tests are the only practical way to keep a messy, easily distracted democratic system concentrated on helping poor kids learn. She starts with the fairest and most accurate summary of the standards movement ever written by a critic of standardized testing: "It's built around the idea that the villain is mostly low expectations and a failure of will power. Since both are indisputably factors in failure and less onerous to tackle than poverty, for example, this notion eliminates victimology. And it keeps us focused. Ordinary citizens, including parents and teachers, are aware of how often local parent councils, teacher unions, principals, and local school boards have abused their powers--here's a way to catch them. No more excuses." This movement, she says, is particularly appealing "to those who have the most reason to distrust our schools: urban minority families and those inclined to be suspicious of any public institution." "The idea of holding schools accountable to test scores has its attractions, fits aspects of the national mood, and adheres to a long-standing American tradition of turning to standardized testing as the answer to our ills," she says. "But the trouble is, as we keep relearning generation after generation, it contradicts what we know about how human beings learn and what tests can and cannot do. That a standardized one-size-fits-all test could be invented and imposed by the state, that teachers could unashamedly teach to such a test, that all kids could theoretically succeed at this test, and that it could be true to any form of serious intellectual and/or technical psychometric standards is just plain undoable. And the idea that such an instrument should define our necessarily varied and at times conflicting definitions of being well educated is, worse still, undesirable." One of the advantages of reviewing books on my own is that I am perfectly free (as I would not be if I were writing this for a respectable book review page) to call up the author and pick a fight. I tried this with Meier. She called me right back from Boston to gleefully slap me around and help me see the core of her argument. Essentially, she has higher hopes for schools than I do. I think we need standards and tests because they are, at worst, a mild annoyance to the best teachers but essential to keeping an eye on the worst teachers, and allowing administrators to rush help to trouble spots. Meier thinks--and she has years of experience with low-income students to prove her point--that such kids can learn the way graduate students do, in small seminars, debating key points with learned and enthusiastic teachers and researching questions of their own choosing. They can be assessed by independent panels who look at their writings and sit with them for an hour or so asking questions that need much more of an answer than filling in a small rectangle on a computer score sheet with a number two pencil. I think that is a wonderful goal, but that it will take a long time to produce enough teachers able to teach that way. In the meantime we risk losing another generation of poor kids if we don't do the best job we can for them right now. Meier says I am wrong, that we are going to lose them anyway because the tests are badmeasures of what they have learned and because, without a major change in the way we teach, the scores are going to remain low no matter how many resources we pour into our weakest schools. Meier admits that she has lost many more battles than she has won in her long effort to change the direction of American education. She knows her way of helping those children who most need help is difficult, and she cannot guarantee that it will work everywhere. But she has at least as much, if not more, to show for her efforts as anyone else I know, and she has thankfully not lost her sense of humor in the process. I asked how she could count on a culture that worships baseball scores and stock tables and annual reports to shed its yearning for regular standardized test data from schools. She said she understood the problem, but thought Americans were capable of rising above our craving for strict numerical assessment of all things. She said she understands that weakness because she shares it. "I like baseball scores," she said. "I like them so much that that may explain why I have always been a New York Yankees fan. I want to win at something." © 2002 The Washington Post Company |
