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Clayton Davis's avatar

Following yesterday's post, is there a chance that some of this anti-testing spittle on the liberal left is partly redirected anxiety over high-end college admissions? Or even bad-faith attempts to transition towards "softer" metrics like GPA, club membership, and letters of rec because they're easier for mediocre rich kids to game than the SAT?

I have this hunch, purely anecdotal, that the most vociferous anti-testers are rich white parents who publicly scream about helping poor black kids but privately worry more about their bumbling failson with SAT scores far below the median for incoming freshmen at their elite alma mater.

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James's avatar

I'd add to this in a few ways. One is to note that the liberal consensus was decidedly pro-testing in the 90s and 2000s, but that the way in which large scale state testing rolled out under NCLB was modeled on Texas - which, FDB pointed out, may not have been the success story it claimed to be.

Another is that the testing became a tool in the hands of various reformers. Clearly it's the teachers unions who are to blame, I mean, look at these test scores! Enter Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Bloomberg. Right along side of those reformers came expanded voucher programs, more charter schools, and pushes against collective bargaining. So, while the testing was finding various inequalities - something that liberals thought would provide evidence for locating and improving instructional practices, thus outcomes - the policies that seemed to result from testing's evidence base threatened teachers and schools systems' historic power as well as local control (charters and vouchers being very much outside of local board control in most places). So the liberal intent behind testing was perceived as being turned to somewhat libertarian and market-oriented purposes popular until recently on the right.

Finally, testing came with a veneer of corporate control. As FDB noted in the post kicking off edu week, Gates brought Common Core into being almost single handedly and with surprisingly little resistance (imo this is because, even then, lots of educators were still feeling like testing revealed a problem, so curriculum goals could solve it). The other big thing the Gates Foundation did was roll out curriculum aligned to Common Core in districts around the country and try to implement evidence-based instruction to, well, end educational inequality. It didn't work and Gates more or less lit money on fire for about a decade. But teachers and districts felt burned (especially when the CSAIL report said teachers and districts were the reason Gates' project failed).

So, at least coming from the perspective of the schools and their teachers/aides/admins, nearly two decades of constant changes, instability, and ruthless pay/benefits/job security cuts seemed to be the results of these tests. And the supposed upside, the renaissance of data-driven best-practices and all the other hyphenated buzzwords failed to materialize. Anyone remember teachers being forced to kneel under desks because their test scores didn't go up and then getting fired when the scores didn't go up again? How about the ATL scantron parties where district leadership just falsified the scores?

The tests themselves are not to blame, obviously. And they are not some warped instrument of white supremacy wielding western colonialist mathematics against black and brown bodies (to borrow the parlance). But they were the justification that schools heard again and again for what turned out to be a whole package of reforms that didn't work but made life in many schools much worse. This was especially true in the schools that were the lowest performers.

So you can see why testing gets lumped in with all the bad stuff. Justified or not, it comes from somewhere and it's not only unpopular because of what the testing reveals but also because of what the testing was used for.

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