Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing

A week doesn't go by, without a mainstream media story on the "horrors" of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that journalists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth spread by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers' unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book.As Phelps tells it, Kill the Messenger "is as much about censorship and professional arrogance as it is about testing." The author contends that the teachers and administrators who control the public education monopoly, and the teacher education professors who monopolize teacher credentialing, oppose standardized testing in order to shield themselves from public scrutiny and accountability. "... it is disturbing, because school administrators and education professors represent a group of public servants who should serve as models to our children. We pay them high salaries and give them very secure jobs. Then, we give them our children. Is just a little bit of external, objective evaluation of what they do with our money and our children really asking so much?"Influential test-bashers include Walter Haney, Linda McNeil of Rice University, Harvard's Howard Gardner, University of California president Richard Atkinson, writers Alfie Kohn and Nicholas Lemann, and the organizations Fair Test, UCLA's CRESST (National Center for Research on Evaluations, Standards, and Student Testing), and Boston College's CSTEEP (Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy).Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children's academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. "Objective" is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. "External" means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. "Standardized" means that a test "is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way." And "high stakes" means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful

"Kill the Messenger" presents a compelling case in favor of standardized testing. The evidence presented by Phelps is stunning. His treatment of the subject is quite thorough. We do not allow other industries to dictate their own performance measurements. Why do we allow it in education? And as we continue to trust our educators, our children are lagging sadly behind those in other countries. Obviously our current approach to education is not working and yet we allow our educators to sing the same song and dance the same dance.

"Kill the Messenger" by Richard Phelps is an effective and extensively documented defense of standardized testing and the flawed and fabricated arguments of its opponents. As a teacher of Advanced Placement U.S. History, I "teach to the test," a national test that over 100,000 students take each May. Colleges, the military and many employers find applicants' standardized test results useful, because they can usefully predict future success. Does anyone think that a college admissions committee can find no useful, predictive value between one student's SAT math score of 420 and and another's 620 out of a possible 800? In the real world of high schools, within one school system and even within one school building, the same year-long performance by one student might receive a grade of D or F with one teacher, while another might assign it a grade of A or B. This is the reality of American education that parents, students and teachers across the country know all too well. By employing a common set of uniform measures, standardized tests allow a college admissions committee to see which sets of grades appear to be more reliable. Phelps shows the contradictions in the arguments of testing opponents: "Most of us would argue that it is not fair to make high-stakes judgments of students based on the mastery of material to which they have not been exposed. Most testing opponents concur. They criticize vociferously when high stakes tests cover subject matter that students have not had an opportunity to learn. Then, sometimes in the same argument or speech, testing opponents will criticize just as vociferously the process of teaching material thatis covered on a test - that is wrong, too, that is 'teaching to the test.'"Since public education is supported by tax dollars, the public has a right to know how its schools are performing. Standardized tests document the abject failure of many school systems to educate large numbers of students and simultaneously attest to real success, wherever it appears.Phelps targets other evocative but baseless accusations against testing, including: "testing distorts instruction" (sad to say, the force of standardized tests often leads to the first effective teaching in a class or school!), "ignores each student's individuality," "penalizes the use of innovative curricula and teaching strategies" (could it be that these strategies, such as wasting huge amounts of instructional time on group projects and group activities, may prevent students from learning the material they are expected to know?), "unfair to women and minorities" (In reality, standardized tests reveal that many school systems are so dysfunctional that they fail to provide adequate instruction for minorities.), etc.In a chapter that should interest all parents, Phelps examines the misleading criticisms of "The Big, Bad SAT," which almost two-thirds of U.S. colleges include in the mix of criteria for making admissions decisions. Colleges use the SAT [a

Standardized testing in the public schools -- the measurement of the results of public education -- has now reached federal proportions worth billions of dollars. Anyone at all involved in the debate (or war) needs more than newspaper columns and horror stories to go by, and this book's systematic account is a necessity for those who sincerely want real information. That Phelps is in favor of standardized testing is of course evident from the title, for "Kill the messenger" is plainly what he believes the opponents of testing are urging; yet Phelps's account of the battle represents a great deal more than advocacy. It contains facts, insights, and reports of research (real and phony both) that every teacher, supervisor, professor of education and legislator needs; and it is fascinating reading as well.

In Kill the Messenger, Phelps offers a welcome antidote to the many writers who have criticized the increasing use of standardized tests. While he clearly understands the technical side of testing, his writing is easily accessible to anyone interested in learning both sides of the controversies swirling about testing. As a former president of the Milwaukee school board, I found particularly satisfying his skewering of the claims by some of the more irresponsible critics of the tests.