Testing Redux

Last week it was announced that no less than 10,000 3rd graders in New York would not be promoted as they failed the standardized tests. It is a problem not just for those kids, but for all of us. While the term social promotion is fashionably bandied about the simple fact is that someone who is left back is left behind in more ways than one. They will be much more at risk to drop out before graduating.

I have a horse in this race. I'm the only child of six to graduate from high school and one of my siblings is a grammar school dropout. I was a SEEK student who only gained admission to college because there was a political will to give meaningful access to the underprivlidged. My daughter is a student at a public school here in New York. This is something that I cannot ignore.

To start high stakes tests do not tell you how well you will do in later life. They do a terrible job of that. The SAT exams for one underpredict achievement by women and overpredict achievement by men routinely. It is also the simple fact that such tests are normed, which means they are designed to impose a bell curve on data at all costs. The idea of imposition of a distribution is very important as you have to have by design a "below average" and a "talented tenth" no matter how well people do in actually answering the questions. And someone has to be below average for the test to work. It's also true that, as the sociologist Claude Steele has seen that such tests reinforce and feed into the social and cultural pathologies we have here in America. They are crude sorting devices. In terms of kids they are particularly pernicious and hurtful. They have clear cultural bias and do favor by design the dominant culture. How many of those kids actually are doing well but the test cannot tell you that?

The economists and statistician W. Edwards Deming believed that we create on a regular basis a situation of artificial scarcity. We make the world fit the bell curve in his view. Why can't everyone be educated well instead of being well-educated? Fear is a much less critical element in success than pride. Leadership trumps standards. Even more important, build quality into what you do rather than looking for it after the fact. Deming wasn't a grammar school teacher, but he would understand an empowered, interested kid is much more valuable than an ashamed one who has been called a failure. Build on and with pride. Interestingly enough Deming's ethics are also those of the Open Source movement, a subject of earlier posts.

And of course we have here in America a cruel and pernicious caste system that is imposed culturally on all of us. It is the legacy of hundreds and hundreds of years of slavery and abuse. Testing, as Claude Steele has shown, is to no small extent a part of this legacy, but it does the dangerous thing of giving a pseudo-scientific sheen to what is really a cultural travesty. Handle with care.