culture fix

Manufacturing Destinies: The Racialized Discourse of High-Stakes Testing

Whatever its little detours may be, ultimately, the goal of racism is dominance. (Memmi 2000, 55)

Racialized discourse operates to construct racialized subjectivities and identities. (Gann 2000, 12)

Since its inception in the United States, the public school system has been seen as a method of disciplining children in the interest of producing a properly subordinate adult population. Sometimes conscious and explicit, and at other times a natural emanation from the conditions of dominance and subordinacy prevalent in the economic sphere, the theme of social control pervades educational thought and policy. (Bowles and Gintis 1976, 37)

In the twentieth century public education in the United States consistently presented itself as a liberal democratizing force for the world that operates in the name of justice, freedom, and excellence. However, closer examination of schooling practices reveals an ideology of domination at work that systematically reproduces, reinforces, and sustains the hegemonic forces of social control, and regulation, linked to class oppression, gender inequalities, and racialization exclusion of populations. Not surprisingly, therefore, popular myths related to meritocracy, the rights and privilege of the elite, and the need for state consensus have together conserved an ideology of "race" that fuels the current craze over high-stakes testing in public schools today.

This rapidly growing phenomenon can best be understood in light of the major changes taking place in the socioeconomic landscape of U.S. society, changes that could ignite greater class conflict and social unrest than modern history has ever known. This condition continues to worsen for the growing numbers of working-class people, given recent events associated with the global political economy that have resulted in thousands of workers being laid off with fewer options for employment. Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C. echoed this theme in a 2002 speech he gave in Japan at the Asia-Europe-U.S. Progressive Scholar’s Forum: Globalization and Innovation of Politics. In his comments, Faux confirmed that inequality has become worse. "In the short term, we can expect the U.S. unemployment rate. . . to rise." (4) "In the long term, the U.S. economy is clearly headed for a financial crisis" (8) with an account deficit of over $400 billion. Moreover, preliminary findings from The State of Working America (Mishel, et al. 2002) predict that unless the economy reverses course soon, working families can look forward to high and rising unemployment that will generate wage stagnation, higher poverty rates, and rising inequality. Workers’ response to the impact of this economic decline on their lives is well-illustrated in a recent front-page story in the Christian Science Monitor entitled "Labor more militant as economy teeters." The story reported that "the nation’s economic slowdown is threatening millions of ordinary workers’ paychecks and jobs" (Belsie 2002).

Alex Molnar (1996) in Giving Kids the Business points out that simultaneously with a depressed economy and worsening conditions for workers, "the rhetoric about the catastrophic failure of American public schools [has] become even more feverish" (10). Business leaders clamor for free-market solutions to educational problems, alleging that these solutions can improve education at no additional cost. These reforms conceal the fact that they "offer a public-spirited justification for introducing education to the profit motive and giving educators a healthy dose of the 'real world' in the form of competition.

Most important, they keep the focus on schools and off the failure of business to promote the well-being of most of the country's citizens." (10)
In response to the pressure from business, the enterprise of education has become more and more fixated on making claims of scientific authority to carry out its instrumentalized policies in response to the academic problems faced by students from the working-class and communities of color. The historical parallels between the contemporary "accountability experts" in education and the "cost-efficiency consultants" of the early part of the twentieth century are worth noting. In both historical eras there was increasing immigration, burgeoning student enrollments in urban centers, economic decline, and overt military action overseas. Moreover, big business leaders seeking to take control of public education in the early 1900s utilized the same rhetoric of corruption and the declining efficiency of public schools, so prevalent among corporate elites today, to legitimate their move. In the early 1990s elite businessmen ran for school boards and solicited the advice of efficiency experts like Frederick Taylor in their misguided effort to make schools function like well-oiled factory machines.

The Politics of Accountability

In today’s world, corporate leaders again hold the enterprise of education hostage through their demand for new accountability measures, in exchange for support of tax hikes and budget increases. The tactics of these businessmen are closely aligned to the idea that schools should function with the efficiency of a for-profit business, with a chief executive officer (CEO) holding the reins of the district and the language and practices of schooling translated into the technical realm of accountability. These business leaders insist that measurable, scientifically based objectives should be the primary impetus for making decisions, designing curricula, and articulating the pedagogical imperatives of the classroom. They advocate fervently for an increase in standardized testing.

They argue that emphasis on testing ensures that 1) schools and teachers are accountable to communities, and students are accountable for their lessons, 2) quality of education is increasing as scores increase, 3) economic and academic opportunities are expanding for students that attain higher scores, and 4) schools are accountable to a patriotic curriculum. Using standardized tests as a hammer, many of these leaders tell students to be accountable for their classwork and homework, parents to be accountable for their children’s performance and teachers to be accountable for their students’ performance. In doing so, they effectively marginalize discussion of the real problems in education. (Caputo-Pearl 2001, 4)

In the process, the yardstick of test scores has achieved an overarching prominence, seriously limiting educational debates to that of numbers and categories of students to be tested. Questions welcomed and legitimated within this narrow discourse of quality and accountability adhere to standardized testing as the most effective and legitimate means for assessing academic achievement. Rather than entertaining questions regarding student ability and overall performance, current educational debates all loop back to the issue of testing and the improvement of test scores. Thus, it is not unusual for educators to ponder questions such as: How soon can recent immigrant students be tested? What subjects and grade levels should be tested? What scores should be used to determine grade promotion or graduation? What degree of movement in the improvement of scores should be required to grant bonuses to principals? What scores should determine teacher merit pay?

Within the current discourse of accountability, rarely is there any serious or substantive mention of academic success outside test score indicators. In this closed system of accountability, there is no dialogue related to the very conditions under which schooling functions, its unexamined assumptions, and its effect on students, as such questions are deemed irrelevant or scientifically irrational. Issues unrelated to the measurement of test scores are considered anecdotal at best or ideological prattle at worst, justifying their dismissal as inconsequential to public policy and educational debate. Nowhere is this change more evident than in California, where the reform movement in support of testing and the standardization of knowledge openly and unabashedly turned the education of working-class and poor students of color into "drill and kill" exercises of teaching-to-the-test and highly scripted literacy instruction such as Open Court, which is being widely used by many districts. The exceedingly prescriptive nature of these practices leaves little doubt that state testing and test-driven curricula are directly or indirectly linked to an academically limiting and subordinating system of social control—one that successfully sustains the reproduction of class formation in both public schools and the larger society.

Moreover, to ensure compliance, school funding, principal tenure, and teacher incentive pay are being determined more and more by performance contracts linked to performance as measured by a single indicator--the aggregation of student standardized test scores. Standardized testing is increasingly being used as the central mechanism for decisions about student learning, teacher and administrative practice, and overall school quality (Heubert and Hauser 1999). This is exemplified by a supplementary section published in the Rocky Mountain News entitled "CSAP 2002: A Guide to Results of the Students Assessment Tests." The twenty-four-page supplement (of which eighteen pages consist of test scores for Colorado schools) reported "Colorado’s largest-ever release of state scores" (2E). Story headlines reveal the problems with standardized testing: "Test scores hit the wall" (2E), "Schools fare better, worse in DPS" (3E), "Affluent districts score at top" (4E), "Spotty performance to cost Jeffco $4.5 million" (4E), and "Tax dollars are tied to results in state's largest school districts" (4E).

The consequence is that the institutionalized locus of control over curriculum, teaching, and assessment, all based upon a tightly regimented set of prescriptions, not only locates authority over educational decisions at the state level but also, as mentioned earlier, gives the power over those decisions to business leaders. The insidious nature of this hegemonic mechanism of control is glaringly evident in a national commission report, issued in the early 1990s by the Ford Foundation, which estimated that nearly 130,000,000 standardized tests were being administered to elementary and secondary students, at an estimated cost of $500 million a year (Toch 1991). This has resulted in the preponderance of testing within public schools, and of the reform movement so invested in it. "[I]ncreasingly it is in terms of standardized test scores alone that the nation judges its schools and educators judge themselves" (206).

Yet, despite its key role in the accountability reform movement, studies repeatedly show that standardized tests are flawed when used as a single measure of progress because they fail to measure students' ability to judge, analyze, infer, interpret, or reason--namely, to engage in critical thought. Standardized tests have been found even less useful in measuring students’ more advanced academic knowledge. One reason for their failure is associated with the purpose behind norm-referenced tests, such as the Stanford 9 [NOTE ON CAT 5] that has been widely administered in California public schools. These tests are designed to rank students against one another, rather than to measure students' knowledge of the material. Many of the questions
...are intentionally developed so that a relatively high percentage of students will be tricked by them. This is an important method of differentiating one student from another in the rankings. Further, because test scores are supposed to fall into a bell curve pattern in comparing one to the other, 50% of students will always be considered "below average" or "below middle ground." (Caputo-Pearl 2001, 7)

Other reasons associated with student failure are directly tied to questions of cultural relevancy and class biases hidden in the conceptual construction and language use of standardized tests.

As if these problems were not enough, there are widespread testing problems related to the administration and scoring of tests. In New Mexico, 70 percent of superintendents reported a variety of testing errors. In Georgia, Harcourt Educational Measurement could not deliver accurate results from spring 2002's Stanford 9 tests in a timely fashion. In Nevada, officials reported that 736 sophomores and juniors had mistakenly been told they had failed the math portion of a test, although they had actually passed. And even states such as North Carolina, "considered models of accountability are struggling to come up with reliable tests" (Jonsson 2002, 11).

Even more disconcerting is the way the politics of standardized testing functions to silence and prevent greater public engagement within communities. When the only language of currency for the construction of educational policy is linked to accountability, the capacity of parents, communities, and educators to raise significant and more complex questions related to student academic success is jeopardized and impeded. Excluded are critiques based on democratic values, children's development, cultural differences, class privilege, and other critical questions that could potentially unveil the social and economic consequences of standardized testing. In the current political climate, the only conversations deemed meaningful are those directly linked to raising test scores.

In Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing, Linda McNeil (2000) sheds light on the way this insidious
system of accountability is operationalized. First, the tenure for principals is replaced by "performance contracts." Their contract renewal, assignment, and annual bonuses are predicated on test score results in their school’s—which reinforce the role of the principal as compliance officer and justify the principal's intervention and control over the labor of teachers. Second, newspaper ratings and state rankings of schools disaggregate by "race" and ethnicity. All their scores must "improve."

“ This disaggragating of scores gives the appearance that the system is sensitive to diversity and committed to improving minority education. This reporting, however, actually exacerbates . . . a focus on tests to the exclusion of many other forms of education. Increasingly common is the substitution of commercial test-prep materials in place of traditional curricula and instructional activities for these students" (233). Consequently, teachers are held captive to the accountability protocols set forth by the state, with virtually no room to generate or execute more effective criteria for assessing the academic progress of their students.

The Deskilling of Teachers

The requirements for high-stakes testing of students also set into motion a series of state-mandated curricula aimed at minimizing teacher skills, in conjunction with long-term pedagogical practices of social control and regulation within schools. Increasingly, the curricula and tests are divorced from any serious consideration of critical forms of pedagogies or learning theories. The development of standardized curricula, assessment instruments, and high-stakes testing often fails to consider the wealth of research and literature on teaching and learning to inform its execution. Undoubtedly an educational system that willingly ignores curriculum theory and child development research—not to mention the social, political, and economic realities of students' lives—has the veiled organizational objective of serving as a regulatory and exclusionary mechanism to control teacher work and student outcomes.

Testing and teaching-to-the test serve as mechanisms to instill a teacher-proof curriculum which, in many cases, may include narrowly prescribed checklists for assessing minimum teaching and student skills. Undoubtedly, such regimentation makes schooling exceedingly simple for less skilled teachers. Many teachers are happy to offer routine lessons according to a standard sequence and format, preferring to function as deskilled laborers who do not have to do much thinking or preparation with respect to their practice. In contrast, a teacher-proof instructional approach makes it extremely uncomfortable and disturbing for those teachers who know their subjects well, who teach in ways that critically engage their students, and who want teaching to be linked to the realities of students’ lives. Moreover, this “controlling, top-down” push for higher standards may actually produce a lower quality of education precisely because the tactics constrict the means by which teachers most successfully inspire students' engagement in learning and commitment to achieve. (Ryan and La Guardia 1999, 46)

The standardization of the curriculum at the state level echoes the distrust of teachers by the public and legislators--a fabricated distrust that is widely used to rally sentiment and support for high-stakes testing. Consequently, standardized testing results are used to support a principal's efforts to exercise greater power over teachers, since test scores are deemed a legitimate and objective way to measure teacher performance. The primary goal of the standardized curriculum, then, is to provide all teachers with the exact course content to which they must adhere. Hence, any variation in the quality of student performance, according to the current logic of accountability, can be tied directly to the quality of teaching. In this way, low student scores can be justified to fire teachers without further discussion, and high student scores can be used to grant merit pay to teachers as reward for their compliance.

This is an example of how a system of rewards and punishment works in schools to preserve the status quo by giving people what they need or want (i.e., salary increases) as an incentive or motivation for compliance, thereby insuring teacher regulation and social control within the classroom. However, it is imperative that we recognize that such a pervasive system of rewards and punishment is not predicated on a law of nature. It reflects a particular ideology or set of assumptions in the education system that must be questioned, particularly when it dismantles social agency and reinforces dependence on school officials. Kohn (1993), a staunch critic of the rewards and punishment system endemic to public school practices, views this system of social control and regulation as rooted in the legacy of behaviorism and scientism:

We are a nation that prefers acting to thinking, and practice to theory, we are suspicious of intellectuals, worshipful of technology and fixated on the bottom line. We define ourselves by numbers--take home pay, percentiles (how much does your baby weigh), cholesterol counts, and standardized testing (how much does your child know). By contrast we are uneasy with intangibles and unscientific abstractions such as a sense of well-being or an intrinsic motivation to learn. (9-10)

In the urgency to test students, the disempowering effects and negative impact of the testing situation itself and the removal of students from the classroom several times during the year for testing are seldom discussed. Such practices disrupt the developmental momentum of student learning, provoke enormous unnecessary stress and tension in students, and interfere with the quality of interaction in the classroom. In many ways, the politics of testing, along with the prescribed curriculum it inspires, ultimately erodes teacher autonomy and creativity, as well as teachers' authority within their classrooms. In the process, teachers are socialized to become highly dependent on prepackaged materials and the authority of state-sanctioned educational experts to provide the next curricular innovation.

McNeil (2000) argues that the bottom line is that the state mechanism for assessing teacher quality, like proficiency testing, must be cheap, quick, generalizable across all subjects and school settings, and capable of being used by school-level administrators independent of their knowledge of the subjects being taught. In many cases, what is generated is a factory-like checklist reminiscent of the social efficiency era, reducing teaching to specific, observable, and thus measurable behaviors, many having little or nothing to do with the content of the material being taught or with the particular pedagogical needs of students. Typically, behaviors found on teacher assessment checklists can include such items as eye contact with students, whether the daily objective was written on the board, whether there was a catchy opening phrase and definite closure to the lesson, and the number of times teachers varied their verbal responses to students.

A major consequence of standardized testing and teaching-to-the-test is that the emphasis of learning is transferred from intellectual activity to the dispensing of packaged fragments of information. Meanwhile, students and teachers, as subjects of classroom discourse who bring their personal stories and life experiences to bear on their teaching and learning, are systematically silenced by the need for the class to "cover" a generic curriculum at a prescribed pace established by the state. In making the case against standardized testing, Kohn (2000) argues,

High-stakes testing has radically altered the kind of instruction that is offered in American schools, to the point that “teaching to the test” has become a prominent part of the nation’s educational landscape. Teachers often feel obliged to set aside other subjects for days, weeks, or (particularly in schools serving low-income students) even months at a time in order to devote [time] to boosting students’ test scores. Indeed, both the content and the format of instruction are affected; the test essentially becomes the curriculum. (29)

Through the hegemonic process of standardized testing, teachers, as workers, have become the new scapegoat of the system. As a result of the political struggles in education rooted in the civil rights era, it became unfashionable to blame students, their parents, or their culture. Teachers, whose status is located at the next lowest rung of the educational hierarchy (after students), became the most likely suspects. State and national teacher tests, based upon the very same premise as those administered to their students, are now being used as a primary indicator of teacher labor, rather than the quality of their actual teaching. Such an assessment mechanism can now more easily be used to support the notion that the problem of student failure is the fault of poor teachers.

So, once again, educational debates have shifted from the quality of teaching and the schooling process to that of "quality control"—a shift closely linked with conservative political efforts to dictate the agenda of public education. This debate justifies taking further control of their labor away from the hands of teachers. In the process, there is no consideration for increasing classroom resources, nor are provisions made for instructional materials and ongoing teacher development linked to enhancing the quality of children's learning or teacher-parent relationships. Little attention is given to engaging communities in a plan to rectify persistent inequalities. More clearly, there is little willingness to openly challenge the asymmetrical relations of power that result in the racialized reproduction of class formations. Such a strategy must be central to efforts geared toward dismantling the educational injustices prevalent in public schools today.

The Racialized Discourse of Testing

More disturbing is the use of this system of accountability to justify the undemocratic governance of urban public schools. In many ways, the racialized discourse of the old efficiency rhetoric was refashioned into the new accountability rhetoric and quickly seized and embraced by mainstream educators and researchers who felt they were losing control of schooling debates to those who clamored for greater democratic participation by teachers, students, parents, and communities. The language of scientific accountability, with its narrow focus on test scores, was seen as a sure way to replace the messiness of "interest group" participation in schools; that is, the participation of those who had historically been excluded from the debate in the first place.

In this way, the racialized discourse of testing in public schools has historically played an insidious role in the perpetuation of underachievement among working-class and racialized student populations. Bowles and Gintes (1976) argue that the educational system legitimates economic inequality by providing an open, objective, and ostensibly meritocratic mechanism for assigning individuals to unequal economic positions. Through the construction of testing instruments as value-free scientific tools, considered to produce objective, measurable and quantifiable data, predefined skills and knowledge have been given priority at the expense of the cultural knowledge and experience of students from economically disenfranchised communities. (103)

As mentioned earlier, the evaluation and assessment of students (as well as teachers) is predicated on the results of standardized tests, which are used to sort, regulate, and control students. The testing of students increasingly drives the curriculum and prescribes both teaching and the role of students in their learning. This prescriptive teaching hardens and intensifies the discrimination already at work in schools, as teaching the fragmented and narrow information on the test comes to substitute for a substantive curriculum in the schools of poor and minority students. This intensified discrimination and widespread pattern of substituting test-prep materials, devoid of substantive content and respect for the ways children learn, is particularly marked in schools that serve economically oppressed children. Hence, standardized testing has historically functioned to systematically reproduce, overtly and covertly, the conditions in schools that perpetuate a culture of elitism, privilege, and exploitation.

Among the most insidious dimensions tied to the preservation of this ideology of dominance in schools are the unexamined philosophical assumptions and values that undergird, and hence legitimate, educational policies and practices associated with standardized testing. Many of the values and assumptions at work in sustaining asymmetrical relations of power within the larger society have been engaged substantially in the work of radical educators, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and other social critics during the last century. This chapter can do no more than provide a brief overview of some of the primary values and assumptions operating in schools. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that the interrelatedness of these assumptions often functions in concert to successfully veil the ideological contradictions that exist between a rhetoric of democratic ideals and the racialized discourse and practices of dominance at work in U.S. public schools. Teachers may seldom connect these assumptions to their teaching practice although they underlie what teachers do in their classrooms (Kohn 1993).

Another overarching philosophical assumption that undergirds the ideology of public schooling today is the unbridled, but veiled, acceptance of Darwinian conclusions related to belief in the "survival of the fittest." As a result, much educational rhetoric functions to justify the existence of economic inequality, sexism, racialized notions of humanity, and good old U.S. self-promotion at the expense of the greater good. Such rhetoric is well-disguised in the false benevolence at work in the discursive justifications for standardized testing, tracking, and the competitive and instrumentalizing curricular practices found in classrooms today.

Thus, "commonsense" beliefs about human nature, deeply rooted in racialized and class notions of normalcy, are actively at work in the assessment of student intellectual abilities and their potential for academic success. For example, racialized beliefs about the inferior or superior abilities and potential of particular student populations are often utilized to justify the so-called objective measurement of student knowledge and then to use these measures to justify the unequal distribution of educational resources and opportunities. The fact that such practices effectively perpetuate class interests is well-hidden by a racialized educational discourse that glorifies expediency in learning, separates theory from practice, heralds the conquest of nature, and objectifies time and human experience in the name of scientifically fabricated assessment criteria.

Also inherent in the racialized discourse of testing is an overwhelming penchant for unbridled individualism at the expense of a greater collective well-being. Hence, competition among students within the context of knowledge construction is strongly reinforced and rewarded. Students learn very quickly to acquiesce in the wiles of competition so as to be deemed worthy material for academic success in the future. In the process, knowledge is reified and objectified and students are socialized to accept that knowledge is objectively disconnected from the subjective realm of human experience. This is in contrast to a view of knowledge that connects its construction and evolution to the realities of the larger social milieu. Accordingly, students become convinced, particularly as they advance in the educational hierarchy of achievement, that their goal is to independently construct some "original" notion, thought, idea, or theory in order to gain prominence in their chosen field.

The organizational regimes of power or the hegemonic forces at work in the legitimation of knowledge and the institutional assignment of both "originality" and worthiness are seldom acknowledged. It is disturbing that the very qualities considered essential to the education of elite students and later, crucial to the dicta of graduate school success, are virtually absent in and almost entirely negated by standardized testing in public schools.

Further, the individualistic and economist language so prevalent in the racialized discourse of high-stakes testing is deeply rooted in the ideological tenets of advanced capitalism. Its materialist emphasis on private property is extended to the domain of knowledge, where intellectual ideas become the property of an individual or the state. Hence, the pedagogy of the elite very early teaches students that they are the owners of their intellectual products with the right to sell or buy these products at their discretion. In contrast, poor and working-class students are schooled into subordination, socialized to accept, accommodate, and comply with the knowledge deemed "truth," even when that knowledge is diametrically opposed to their experience and well-being. Academic socialization thus encourages poor students not to be creators of knowledge but to be consumers of specific knowledge forms prescribed by the dominant class. Nowhere is this prescription of knowledge for the oppressed more readily visible than in the racialized discourse of standardized testing—a prescription steeped in the rhetoric of scientism.

Scientism and Meritocracy

The scientific claim of accountability experts is one of the most devious and fallacious elements in the testing mania. An overemphasis on "hard" science and "absolute objectivity" gives rise to scientism rather than real science. Scientism refers to the power and authority vested in the mechanization of intellectual work generated by specialists. Consequently, knowledge is fragmented and instrumentalized by way of reductionist interpretations of student learning. Hence the very claim of objectivity is steeped in the cultural assumptions and racialized discourse of the dominant class.

Schools, then, operate upon a view of the world, or ideology, clearly governed by an instrumentally technocratic rationality that glorifies a logic and method based on the natural sciences. To comply with the scientific requirement of measuring knowledge, high-stakes tests are constructed under the rubric of objective knowledge. This knowledge is treated as an external body of information, produced independently of human beings and independent of time and place. Thus it can be expressed in language that is technical and allegedly neutral. School knowledge becomes not only countable and measurable but also impersonal. Teaching-to-the-test thus becomes normalized and acceptable and testing is exalted as the only truly effective and “unbiased” mechanism to measure academic success and achievement.

In the process, extensive field-based research on standardized testing that has documented its negative effects on teaching and learning, particularly on working-class and racialized students, is categorically ignored. Even worse is the lasting harm caused by imbedded controls, the legitimization of "accountability" as the language of school policy, and the elimination of wider public debates on the purpose of schooling for poor, working-class, and racialized students on concrete educational efforts to democratize schooling practices.

Scientism also supports a carte blanche adherence to the educational practice of meritocracy, which is one of the primary hegemonic mechanisms implicated in the inequitable achievement and advancement of students in the educational system. It constitutes a form of systemic control by which racialized educational discourse is naturalized and perpetuated. Public schools persistently tout the myth of scientism to guarantee that successful participation in the educational system is the most visible and legitimate process by which individuals are allocated or rewarded higher status within the society at large. Through a system of merit tied to high-stakes testing, for example, the process of unequal privilege and entitlement is successfully camouflaged under the guise of “fair and equal” opportunity for all students.

Through the daily practices of meritocracy linked to social promotion (or demotion) and graduation, a twofold justification of inequality is upheld to justify the undemocratic distribution of wealth in this country and around the world. First, it establishes the merit of those in power as the legitimate criterion for achieved social position. And second, it persists in blaming those who fail for their underachievement (whether the blame is assigned to teachers, students, or parents), by implying that they do not have the necessary intelligence, motivation, or drive to partake of what is freely being offered them by the educational system. In other words, if students fail, it's their own damn fault!

Testing and the Politics of Schooling

Within the racialized discourse of education, schools and educators, as agents of the state, are viewed as neutral and apolitical. Their sole purpose is to give students the knowledge and skills necessary to render them functional in and useful to society—in other words, to fulfill their place in the process of consumption and capitalist accumulation. Hence, ideas and practices that accord with dominant knowledge forms are generally perceived to be neutral and acceptable, shrouding the authoritarianism of the status quo. Conversely, knowledge forms that might in any way question the "official" curriculum, methods, or pedagogy are deemed "political" and unacceptable. To make things even more perplexing, opposing views are generally neutralized by a variety of social agents, including: 1. those who knowingly support the limits and configuration of "official" authority within the fundamental order of public schools for their own personal gain; 2. those who are complicit as a consequence of insufficient knowledge and skills to contest the system; 3. those who protect their class interest by "playing the game" while paying lip service to the rhetoric of helping the oppressed; and 4. those who consent due to their overwhelming fear of authority.

Unfortunately, there are many educators and advocates from all walks of life who confidently support the propagation of testing as a legitimate educational strategy in public schools, irrespective of the volumes that have been written linking standardized testing to racism and economic exploitation. The rallying cry of testing advocates is often tied to the question: "If we take away testing, how will we have the objective criteria to demand better schools?" This myopic view fails to link an acceptance and adherence to such educational policies and practices with capitalist interests that perpetuate undemocratic life in this country and around the globe. Even more disturbing is the negative impact that such practices continue to have as students are "railroaded into a testing culture that squeezes out the joy of learning and turns schools into 'factories'" (Woodward 2003). Recognizing the harmful effects of existing practices, the president of the British Association of Teachers and Lecturers argued:

What sort of education system do we have if we brand children as failures by the time they are eleven, or worse, seven? What sort of morality is it to force on young children an impoverished curriculum diet just to help politicians meet targets and keep the Treasury happy? What difference does it really make to a child’s life if he or she achieves [certain levels] aged eleven? Will it really make them a better person, a genuinely enriched human being with a passion for learning? Of course, it won’t. (Moore, cited in the Guardian, April 17, 2003)

In the process of attempting to rally support for their views, many well-meaning educators and advocates who are content to play the "race card" can actually obstruct teachers, parents, and communities who publicly question and critique those ideas, practices, and events that are contrary to community self-determination and the construction of a genuinely democratic political movement in education. Many go so far as to suggest that those who question racialized arguments in defense of testing as a good thing for students of color are somehow falling prey to white, bleeding-heart liberal tendencies. Radical efforts to expose the long-term damage of testing to all oppressed students are viewed as suspect. Rather, we need to make a concerted search for a wider range of information so that we can struggle (beyond identity politics) to dismantle the structures of capitalist domination and inequality in schools and society today.

What the history of civil rights struggles in the United States should have taught us is that our understanding of racism and those schooling practices which perpetuate racialized inequality can never be separated from the reproduction of class relations. Thus, high-stakes testing must be understood as systematically implicated in the reproduction of racialized economic inequality and injustice. For it is precisely through the uncontested acceptance of such mechanisms of social control and regulation that students from the dominant class consistently end up at the top of the hierarchy and students from subordinate communities at the bottom—which in turn readily and unjustly fuels widespread belief in the legitimacy of a hierarchically racialized, gendered, and class-stratified society.

It is no secret that in the United States the most politically powerful are those who control the bulk of society’s wealth and resources. This economic and institutional control is clearly perpetuated from generation to generation through the process of schooling. The ruling class, with its bureaucratic system of managerial officials, strives to retain control of schooling through the construction of educational public policies. Thus the curriculum and pedagogical practices that support the standardization (and control) of knowledge—knowledge that functions in the interest of capitalist relations—effectively sustain the racialized educational discourse in schools. Moreover, through control of teacher certification and such schooling practices as curricular policies, literacy instruction, pedagogy, and testing requirements tied to educational opportunities, the stratification of populations so necessary to capitalist accumulation is successfully maintained. Consequently, even working-class students and students of color learn to compete furiously for the limited "top" positions in society, rather than to alter the social, political, and economic conditions that define (and limit) their future well-being, and ultimately their destinies.

A Politics of Silence

Schools produce and perpetuate knowledge that serves as a silencing agent, in that it legitimizes the abstract reality developed by prescribed knowledge, rather than the actual lived daily experiences that shape the knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Nowhere was this more evident than in the response of most public schools responded to the events of September 11, 2001. The actual experiences of students predicated upon what they were hearing and feeling about this historical moment were marginalized and suppressed. A politics of silence was imposed in order to ensure a return to normalcy, with the expectation that there be minimal discussion about the issue. And when discussions did occur, they echoed the language of a most superficial and vulgar patriotism, in concert with the official public discourse of the government.

Consequently, a blind, flag-waving nationalism substituted for any real critical dialogue. Teachers were told that the attitude in classrooms was to be "business as usual" as students were being ushered in and out of their beginning-of-the-year standardized testing sessions. Meanwhile, the administrative pressure on teachers to keep up with the prescribed curriculum and to prepare students for future testing prevented critical inquiry into the initial and subsequent events connected with the "war on terrorism." So, while the practice of high-stakes testing effectively contributed to an ahistorical and fragmented response to such a significant historical event in the lives of students, booksellers were rushing to develop and insert the official historical reading into traditional social studies textbooks to generate new sales. By the time the events of 9-11 and the "war on terrorism" are officially documented and taught in U.S. classrooms, the lived impact of the events will have been buried and lost for many, with only the prescribed curricula and its sanitized interpretation remaining.

Last, an aspect seldom discussed in education but very much at work in the politics of silence is the racialized discourse of “good and evil” so prevalent in conservative and liberal political discourses on schooling and society. The "good" are those who conform and seek to fulfill their rightful place in the process of capitalist accumulation. As such, the Other is transformed into an "evil" that must be reformed or eliminated. Albert Memmi (2000) speaks to this in his writings on racism. "[T]he other's traits all have a negative valuation. Whatever they are, they will signify something bad. The correlative effect is that the corresponding characteristics for the one who derogates are good. We must keep this inverse relation in mind; it recurs everywhere, even where not apparent and even where the order of the terms have been changed" (95).

From this perspective, all problems in schools and society are approached from the standpoint of how the "evil" (or deviance) must be eliminated in students, teachers, or parents. By linking notions of evil consequences (pregnancy, drug abuse, crime, school drop-out, unemployment, and the like) to academic failure, students who fail are justifiably excluded and rendered disposable. In the testing madness, this notion has been interjected in the definition of good schools, good students, good teachers, and good parents, where the level of "goodness" is determined by the measurable outcomes of standardized testing. The "good" are considered worthy of rewards by the state for their achievement. However, most people fail to acknowledge that the measures for achievement are constantly raised, in order to perpetuate the inequality inherent in the bell curve phenomenon associated with high-stakes testing.

The veiled moralism that unwittingly permeates the racialized discourse of high-stakes testing actually socializes populations to uncritically accept the inferiority of the “Other” and the need for corrective action in order to assure the participation of the majority in the labor market and as rightful citizens of the nation. Hence, many unexamined assumptions that give rise to an ideology enmeshed in the nobility of "good versus evil" shape the uncritical, commonsense perceptions of whole populations as "evil" and in need of punishment or corrective action—whether this action be loss of opportunity, incarceration, or military intervention. Nowhere is this more evident than in the demonizing "good versus evil" arguments disseminated to justify the expansion of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, whether it be the contrived political wars waged in public schools or the fabricated military wars waged overseas, economically dispossessed people are the most destructively affected by the practices of those who seek to retain dominion over their lives.

(Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres. (2004), After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. New York: New York University Press.)