Education Action: Toronto

By Monty Neill (1)

“Capitalism is the first productive system where the children of the exploited are disciplined and educated in institutions organized by the ruling class.”
— Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (2)

I have worked at FairTest in Boston for more than 20 years, striving to change the types and uses of standardized testing in the public schools of the United States (3). My talk will address testing and evaluation in the U.S., another undesirable “gift” from the U.S. to the rest of the world.

FairTest critics often view us as “radical.” This always amused me – we are a single issue group dealing with one little piece of the overall system. People calling us radicals seemed to be making a major exaggeration.

But now I am thinking, as I contemplate again the role of testing in shaping education, that perhaps our critics are so vehement because we are radical, in the sense of getting to the root of things. In battling to transform a key tool in the organization of education, we could affect how the system organizes its indispensable process of creating the next generation of labor power. AS the production of labor power is central to the system, perhaps what we are doing does strikes at the heart of the system in some way.

Of course, the system can organize education to its ends without standardized tests, but having made them so central, it may not be so easy to do so, and those running the system no doubt do not want to have to go through that change if they can avoid it.

And of course I may be exaggerating its centrality. But let us take a look at the history of the uses of testing, and then analyze its current role in US education, to see how testing does fit into the education sector of the production and reproduction of the capitalist system.

Before proceeding, a note on terms: In the U.S., we use “test” to mean a set of questions or tasks administered and scored in a standardized way. “Assessment” derives from “assess”— “to sit beside” — and suggests a variety of possible ways to obtain information about student learning and thinking, of which testing is but one method. (Those who support standardized tests, however, try to colonize the term “assessment” to mean only “test.”) “Evaluation,” deriving from “value,” implies reacting to or making decisions that use assessment information, which can be reduced to no more than standardized responses to test results, or may be much wider and richer. “High-stakes testing” means attaching strong consequences (for students, educators, schools) to the test results.

Part I – A Brief History

Historically, standardized tests reached public schools in the 1920s, through what were labeled Intelligence – IQ – and achievement tests. Given only occasionally, their primary use was as a tool helping to sort students into tracks or streams – vocational, college-bound, or other. One of their creators said it would help convince students to accept their lot in life – if they did not score high enough, they would learn not to expect too much.

Test scores closely paralleled the class and race hierarchy of the nation and therefore helped reproduce, in practice and ideology, that structure. Of course, sometimes low-income students scored well, and tests then helped some of them advance, facilitating some flexibility in the structure and lending support to claims that the tests contributed to a meritocracy.

After World War 2, there was a major expansion of college admissions testing in the form of the “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” now known simply as the SAT.

In 1965, under President Johnson, the U.S. Congress authorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The War on Poverty developed in response to the social struggles especially of African Americans and was an effort to expand and strengthen social democracy by including them into social welfare and improvement programs. ESEA gave extra money to schools with many low-income students.

In response to politicians’ demands for “accountability,” the test companies – an oligopoly – persuaded Congress in the 1970s to put in the law a requirement for schools to administer a standardized test in reading and math to all students who were in ESEA programs. Most schools quickly decided to give the tests every year to all their students, usually beginning by grade 2 (7 years old) though sometimes earlier, until high school (ESEA and these tests were not used extensively in high school). In the U.S., curriculum and testing decisions are under state and local control, though that is changing, as we shall see (4). But to get federal funds, states and localities had to administer these privately-constructed tests.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a new wave of standardized testing as some southern states established what they called “minimum competency tests” for high school students. The official reason for the use of these tests was to ensure employers that graduates possessed at least minimum skills. Southern states, which were poorer and had more African Americans, had school systems that were generally inferior to those in other parts of the country. Minimum competency testing began in these states, then spread to some northern states with large African American populations. Their expansion to more heavily Latino states came later, often not until the past decade.

Under the new requirements, students in these states could not earn a high-school diploma unless they passed tests in reading and math, sometimes also in history or science. Those who did not pass were almost all low-income, children of color, students with disabilities, or students who did not have a sufficient grasp of English. However, the use of these tests often was accompanied by an increase in educational funding. Still, the increased funding was inadequate to provide low-income children with a good education, and so testing emerged in part as quick fix, a way to have “school reform” on the cheap.

There was resistance to all these kinds of testing – ESEA, minimum competency and college admissions. Opponents pointed to the harmful consequences by race, class and gender; and to damage caused to the curriculum. That resistance was not powerful enough to stop a huge increase in testing in the 1970s and 80s. For a while, it did prevent many more states from imposing high school graduation tests, so that the number of states with those tests remained at about 16 for much of the 1990s.

By the early 1990s, the critique that gained the most public attention was that the tests undermined the quality of the curriculum. This led to proposals to change and broaden the kinds of assessment beyond just traditional, mostly multiple-choice standardized tests. The early- to mid-1990s saw great interest in projects and tasks, portfolios, exhibitions, essays, and more. It was a real flowering of thought and practice. Progressive educators and political progressives or leftists pushed forms of assessment that could contribute to improved teaching and learning, particularly of higher order thinking skills, that could be more fair to low-income students and that could be a key part of overhauling schools to be more democratic in their practices and egalitarian in their outcomes. That is, assessment reform was simultaneously technical, pedagogical, and political.

However, by the late 1990s, this movement was largely defeated, and instead we had another great increase in the use of standardized tests. The push for use of a variety of assessments had been promoted in part under the slogan, “what you test is what you get.” That is, if you test only a narrow set of skills and knowledge, that is all that will be taught. However, proponents of tests simply asserted that the “next generation” of standardized tests somehow assessed more than did the traditional tests, which was at best only very marginally true. Still, combinations of costs, technical issues, and mostly fear of allowing teachers to exert much control over curriculum, led politicians, backed by business groups, to reassert the dominance of standardized tests.

More states applied graduation tests and some said students had to pass a test to be promoted to the next grade. Now high school exit tests are in half the states, but they have 70% of the overall population and 80% of the African American and Latino students in the country. In short, where there are particularly subordinated populations, the tests are most common; they exist where the perceived need to control the “other” is most intense. The “others” are the populations least likely to have access to a high-quality education, so politicians sell the tests as a tool for improving education for these students.

In the 1960s, the U.S. introduced the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which was a set of questions and tasks occasionally administered to samples of students to provide a snapshot of U.S. student learning. In the late 1980s, it became a standardized sampling test, and descriptive “levels” (basic, proficient and advanced) were defined for it. Those levels were criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and other independent bodies as being deeply flawed and absurdly difficult. However, the levels have not changed, and they have been a very handy tool for bemoaning the inadequacy of U.S. education and promoting a negative view of schools. Every state must now participate in NAEP or lose federal funds.

The most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), requires all students in grades 3 – 8 and once in high school to take a state reading and math test every year, with science tests also in three grades. It requires that the test results be used to evaluate every school. The law was pushed by conservative president George W. Bush, but supported by leading liberals as well, such as Senator Ted Kennedy (5).

Under NCLB, thousands of schools are declared failing and face sanctions, including being closed, entirely based on their scores on standardized tests. It is true that many of these schools are in bad shape – too little money, too few well-trained teachers, students who move frequently, many with extra learning needs. But instead of improving these schools, the law has perpetuated their weakness and often made them worse. Meanwhile the law actively undermines the quality of education in many decent to good and even very good schools.

This visible damage has produced a great deal of public outcry. But corporate leaders, the major media, and some civil rights groups support the law and want to keep it largely unchanged, even make it a more tough law.

Before analyzing the current situation, let me summarize key points we can learn from the evolution of testing in the US:

- The tests reflect and help perpetuate the existing social hierarchies and power relations. Their use is both practical — how to sort in a system that allows only limited opportunities; and ideological – how to justify that sorting to those being sorted and to the wider society;

- Their main proponents have been business organizations and politicians, with much support from the major media. The tests are presented as both a (false) solution to real problems and a “solution” to non-existent, manufactured problems.

- They grew step by step, one piece at a time, leading many people to accept testing as “normal” or “good.” Originally, they were not used with great frequency, but now there are standardized tests for most students in most grades; in many places, especially large cities with many minority-group youth, students take some kind of standardized test 4 or more times per year.

- The tests have especially harmful consequences for low-income students and students from racial minorities, students whose first language is not English and students with disabilities.

- They rely entirely or mostly on multiple-choice questions, even the college admissions tests, unlike those in most other nations (at least in the global north).

- They emphasize rote learning and memorization; testing expert Norman Fredericksen of Educational Testing Service declared that the real bias in testing was against thinking (6).

- As the stakes attached to the tests got higher, teachers have taught more and more to the test. This does not produce real improvements in learning, but inflated test scores. Score inflation is the equivalent of holding a match to a thermostat. Researchers have demonstrated that if you give the students a different test in the same subject, their scores are much lower – meaning they were not really learning more.

- Teaching to the test is particularly prevalent in low-income areas, which means drill and kill for low-income students with scripted curriculum and repeated testing. The process of scripted curriculum attached to constant testing turns an external tool into an internal process, so that the act of taking a test largely replaces an actual curriculum.

- This turns students off to learning and school, and denies them the chance to learn things that would make them more effective adults. Richer forms of teaching and curriculum generally are reserved for students in wealthy public and private schools. Schooling received by low-income youth continues to prepare them only for low-wage jobs.

- The tests are presented, however, as central to improving schools for low-income children, as well as strengthening nation’s economic competitiveness while enhancing racial and economic equality.

We see, then, that testing has become an essential tool for organizing and controlling schools, curriculum, instruction, teachers and students in ways that reproduce existing inequalities and hierarchies while claiming to overcome those hierarchies.

Before continuing, I want to emphasize again that there has been resistance over the years, particularly from civil rights and education groups. For example, in the early 1970s the National Education Association called for a moratorium on the use of standardized tests. But the resistance has not been strong enough to stem the tide. I would also note that thousands of teachers every day find ways to resist reactionary mandates, find ways to humanize their classrooms and have real, positive relationships with their students. This resistance and humanism is a powerful source of potential positive change, but in general it has not been socially or politically mobilized or organized. Also, many parents want more and different for their children than a regime of teaching to the test, but they too are not organized or politically effective enough. And of course students, especially high school students, are at times organized, but again there has not in general been a sustained and effective student force.

Part II – Why the Emphasis on High-Stakes Testing

In the second part of this talk, I want to dig into the question of why high-stakes standardized testing has almost completely taken over US education in the past decade or so, particularly when it looked for a while in the 1990s that we were on the verge of a positive transformation.

The main factor to consider is the rise of neoliberal capitalism. There is a vast literature on neoliberalism, but I want to emphasize a few points that I think are relevant to understanding the development of the current situation.

Neoliberalism is the capitalist response to the power of working people’s movements across the world in the 1960s and 70s. Those movements, different as they were in the so-called first, second and third worlds, had in common that they demanded more of the wealth created by working people in return for doing less work. These movements had some powerful success in the US as was shown in declining profits and productivity. The resulting capitalist crisis was first and foremost a crisis of capitalisms’ ability to control and put to work human energy.

The neoliberal response to this crisis was to attack working class power and the economic guarantees it had won, to increase divisions among people, to reduce incomes, to increase and intensify work – in short, to use a panoply of tools to increase profitability and accumulation. This has involved technology, international institutions such as the IMF, financial tools, moving centers of material production, and not least guns, as seen from the coup in Chile to the Congo and Gaza today. It has been a very successful move by capital, despite a great deal of resistance in most of the world. Neoliberalism is of course now itself in deep crisis. That is another conversation, but one which is of great relevance for when we ask ourselves what we should do. As always, who will win what in the crisis remains to be struggled over.

Now, what does this planetary, high-level picture have to do with the increasing amount of standardized testing in the US? The first point to emphasize is that schools are a critical, essential space for turning humans into labor power. Hence we have seen a neoliberal school strategy that has applied its tools to the particular terrain of schooling. This strategy has included: efforts to intensify or extend the working day; to use high-stakes testing for intensifying work as well as for sorting students (competing for scores, for example, as urged by Al Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers); and to extend privatization both as a profit source for some companies and more generally as part of the strategy of perpetuating a hierarchically fragmented working population.

In the mid-1980s, President Reagan appointed a commission to examine US education. Their report, A Nation at Risk, blamed educational inadequacy for the economic problems facing the nation. It was a preposterous argument not supported by the report’s own data – but that did not matter. Schools became an important scapegoat, the victim to blame for economic woes and social inequality, and the excuse for attacking public education.

During the ensuing educational “reform” battles through the 1990s, two potentially antagonistic forces apparently joined hands: the corporate neoliberal side, and the school improvement side that often fought for more funding for schools and better schools for low-income children. Their overall unity lay in the acceptance by the school improvement side of the “reality” or inevitability of neoliberalism, and hence of increased standardized testing and increased marketization. The false crisis announced by the report begat the successful push for “accountability,” which has relied primarily on testing. We could say that the claims of crisis are a fabricated form of “shock doctrine,” as Naomi Klein has termed it, used to prepare the way for change (7).

Corporations and politicians claim to want to improve schools because businesses and the nation need a higher quality workforce. This is largely false: most new jobs in the US do not require a great many skills of the sort learned in school (8). There is a modest increase in the amount of literacy and numeracy required for middle-level technical jobs. But the corporations cannot say, “We need a few more workers with stronger numeracy and literacy, but not many, so we will support programs that in fact leave many behind.” Nor can they admit, “It is good to have more workers to fill some slots because they will compete with each other and keep wages down.” Instead, they say they seek to improve schooling for all, including ensuring the students attain a greater array of “critical thinking” skills (more on this below) (9).

In the context of neoliberalism, however, one of the only social arenas that has not seen a significant decline in financial support is schools — people have been able to fight for and win some victories. Ironically, two tradeoffs in winning money for schools has been to accept the ideology that schools are the only real way to address social inequality and poverty – a neoliberal concept since it avoids the realities of poverty; and to accept the growing use of standardized tests. Liberal politicians have accepted a destructive deal in exchange for money. (At first glance, this appears to be continuing under President Obama.) And it is important to understand that funding for schooling is vastly unequal across the nation and remains very inadequate in low-income urban and rural areas, where children suffer from parental unemployment, lack of medical care, poor nutrition, environmental toxins, and frequent mobility.

Let me explore the neoliberal school model a bit more. To do so I will first turn to British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, who famously said there is the individual and the family, but there is no such thing as society. She of course also believed in the market and in the state as enforcer of the market. What she meant is that society is reducible to the capitalist market, and that within the market everything is a matter of individual choice. As there is no society, there also is no community or commons outside of the market.

John Major, Thatcher’s successor, introduced a school program that did three things: – increased centralization by destroying local community control of schools so that all schools reported to the national government; – increased privatization particularly through private control of public schools, a policy expanded by the Blair government (though this is still a small portion of all schools); – and made test scores the instrument for evaluating the system – that is, tests became the educational “money” of the marketized schools, as enforced by the state.

This model was adapted by US conservatives. Their version includes “educational management organizations” (EMOs) and charter schools (both privately controlled but technically public), vouchers (money to families for schooling not money to schools), and high-stakes testing, including recurring proposals for national standards and tests to replace the current state-level standards and tests. Increasingly attached to this program are schemes such as reducing union rights to make it easier to fire teachers and paying teachers for results.

We see here the basic neoliberal schooling model: – a centralized definition of what is to be learned (standards) specified through tests that are centrally controlled at the state or federal levels (or some combination); – increased privatization, treating education as an individual consumer good not a social good, coupled with more privatized administrative control, via charters and “educational management organizations”; and – a vast array of threats to keep the workers – from students to teachers to administrators – in line. In the US, the main threat appears in the form of “accountability” based on tests, as is particularly evident in the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The U.S. “liberals” partial counter to the core neoliberal model has been to push for spending on public schools while allowing more charters (not vouchers), and to use tests to monitor school improvement. If schools do not enable most students to succeed, then there must be interventions to improve the school or to replace it. In NCLB, the law says this mostly means various forms of privatized control – though thus far this has not happened a lot, except in a few key cities such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and in Chicago.

Some liberals and civil rights advocates have accepted this deal: – more money for schools (Bush reneged on this one, but Obama has just dramatically expanded funding for public schools); – creating standards that all students should meet, which they claim will lead to better schooling (this tenet is accepted by most conservatives and liberals, despite an absence of evidence to support it); – and interventions that are supposed to save kids from bad schools by closing them or transforming them into charter schools or by enabling students to move to better schools. (On average, charter schools are academically no better but they increase racial and other segregation; still, many politicians, including Obama, support them.)

In the US there are people who are deeply angry about the conditions of schools and who see institutional inertia, from school bureaucracies to unions, as major parts of the problem. Some of them admit that teaching to current tests is a bad idea. But they have convinced themselves that high-stakes accountability for individuals and schools, coupled with marketization, is what will produce better schools. They are not all reactionaries, but they are wrong, and their acceptance of neoliberal solutions is most dangerous for those children they claim to support.

Here we need to return to reality on the ground. The fact is, the program does not work if the goal is to improve education. We should agree that parents and communities have a right to know how well their schools are doing and that schools incapable of serving their students need to change and in some cases end. But those things do not require or excuse the neoliberal agenda. Here is how that agenda actually works out in the U.S.:

First, intensifying hierarchical divisions within the working population: While the claim is that all students will meet high standards, the reality is that students are sorted through differential opportunities to learn and by test scores in ways that fill all the social roles, from reserve army of labor to corporate management. Divisions work best when the working population can battle within itself. In the U.S., the highly unequal allocation of resources (which predict test scores) is distributed primarily through place of residence. U.S. schools are more racially segregated than at any time in nearly half a century, and poverty is ever more geographically concentrated. That is, battles within the working population over schooling mostly appear through “free market election day” in which dollars are the “votes” that ratify inequality by race and class (10). Since the call to increase standards has not worked to overcome the hierarchy or induce improvements in learning, proponents of standards and testing simply say we need tougher standards and tests (which new U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is now promoting). This will ensure a steeper hierarchy and greater inequality.

Second, hyper-individualism and the market: The material realities of inequality are supported by the ideology of individualism. Schools in the US as in most nations are a form of commons, however inadequate a form of commons they may be (11). They are an expression of a community’s care for its children and its future, even if in large part these take a distorted, capitalistic form. The deepest logic ideology of neoliberalism is competitive individualism, which serves exploitation by denying class solidarity and intensifying hierarchy and division within the class. This means the competition for better schools, for grades, and for access to better colleges. In public schooling, it is ideologically marketed as “choice,” not as privatization.

Third, intensified work: The schools now receiving the most praise (such as KIPP, a chain of charter schools) have extended days – students may be in school 10 or more hours a day. There is a reasonable logic that students from educationally inadequate backgrounds will need extra help and time to catch up. But in practice, especially in the test-driven schools that dominate today, the extended day is largely about work for the sake of work, and hence is preparation to be labor-power on the labor market and then to work hard without questioning too much. The promise is the ability to rise a rung or two on the ladder of the social hierarchy. It likely is not entirely a false claim: as the European descent US population ages, the youth are increasingly low-income and children of color; they must be turned into productive labor power above the bottom rungs of the working class if the US capitalist system is to continue. Most such children, here as in other nations, will of course not be able to rise very far – the system has no room for them. The neoliberal approach uses competition over test scores and grades as carrot and stick for intensifying work.

I should note here that some analysts see neoliberalism primarily as privatization and as a means to lower the costs of the education of the working class through privatization (with testing as a key tool). I continue to think that the most central impetus is organization of the production of labor power, in which the goal is to ensure an adequate production and distribution of varieties of qualities and quantities of labor power while guaranteeing that critical thinking does not question the overall system (12). Privatization is both a tool for that process and a goal in itself for some corporations and ideologues. “Efficiency,” educating working class youth for various slots in the labor market at a relatively low cost, is certainly on the agenda. Nor should we underestimate the danger that the aging U.S. white population will oppose adequate funding for schools full of black and brown children. However, thus far under neoliberalism in the U.S., school funding has tended to increase, not decrease, suggesting the key leaders in the system know they must do more to educate the next generation, but not wanting to spend what it really will take to provide a good education for more than relatively few. In this, privatization is more a tool than the goal itself.

Some might say that pure neo-liberalism means abolishing any government role in education. But capitalists understand they need a school system to prepare workers, and they are not about to scrap it (one reason why educational funding has in general increased). How it is constructed to prepare workers, however, is up for debate, including among capitalists.

Let me bring this back to my focus on testing. From the history of testing in the US, we see the evolution, from before neoliberalism, of the key testing practices and concepts that neoliberalism has used. These include: – the use of high-stakes tests to make decisions about and to exert centralized control over students, teachers and schools even while claiming control is being decentralized; – the use of tests to ideologically justify damaging practices as helpful practices, from sorting students to narrowing the curriculum and intensifying rote work; and – the use of tests as a practical and an ideological vehicle for reorganizing schools to meet corporate needs.

At the present in the US, as we enter into a deep economic crisis, we see first of all an effort to continue this conservative-liberal deal on terms that are essentially neoliberal. President Obama has been contradictory in some ways about this, and it is early in his administration, but I fear he leans toward the neoliberal side, particularly in his selection of Arne Duncan of Chicago to be secretary of education. Duncan presided over high stakes testing and privatization in Chicago (13) and has now called for a national test. Obama has called for less emphasis on standardized tests or at least changes away from the multiple-choice format, and he supports more money for schools, but he and Duncan also propose to perpetuate some of the deepest neoliberal education principles. He supports “strong accountability,” but has not said what that means, and it usually means more detailed control over teachers through testing. He supports charters, though claiming to seek more ways to ensure their quality. He claims to support unions, but then says he wants to make it easier to fire teachers and seeks to foster a steeper wage hierarchy among teachers.

Obama also constantly reiterates the incessant claim that the purpose of schooling is to enable the U.S. to remain competitive in the world capitalist economy. He of course does not question at root that economy, and his key economic advisors such as Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner are thoroughly neoliberal in orientation.

The potentially progressive aspects to Obama’s possible revision of the current education deal would be improved assessment, maybe even allowing for locally-controlled assessments, and support for teacher-led school improvement efforts, including a richer curriculum. If so, what will be critical is whether these changes can be used by teachers, parents and students to reshape schooling to liberatory ends, or at least more humane ends. In the face of potential success in reshaping assessment, neoliberals will insist the reins of control will remain in the hands of bureaucrats and capitalists who will limit and undermine local efforts to exert power. For example, project-based learning can be more interesting and produce more learning in students, it can foster real social critical thinking, and it can be integrated into positive community development; but it also can be used in ways that prepare students to accept the domination of the corporate economy. Further, neoliberals will strive to use computer-based technologies to ensure control over performance assessments and hence over teaching and learning.

There are significant forces angry enough over the current neoliberal education deal to make it hard to perpetuate that deal in new legislation. But it is very doubtful there are enough progressive forces to create a new deal that would, for example, be more democratic, understand schools as part of the commons, and support educators to take the lead in creating better schools. My thinking at the moment is that it is at least somewhat likely that the balance of force within the law can be changed in a modestly positive direction. These changes could give educators more power. We will fight for that. and if we win, perhaps educators will use these opportunities well, thereby reversing the trends toward neoliberal schooling, particularly schooling for low-income children (14).

Of course if the deep recession turns into a full-blown depression, then all bets are off, and the social outcomes in education as in all of society on a world scale will truly be in doubt. In any event, how much is won will depend on the struggle.

Finally, there is a question of what a real alternative for education would be, one that serves the learning needs of children and their communities. The point is not to define it in advance of the society in which it would exist, or to say there is only one model – there will be many Yeses in addition to a unified No against neoliberalism. Rather, the point is to think about how children should be educated, to put on the agenda ideas that can help promote a different society and with it better ways of raising children. In particular, we should ask how to foster radical, participatory democracy in and around education, and how to accomplish what we in the U.S. call the education of the whole child.

And in the absence of the direct possibility of a thoroughly new system – which still seems the case — we must continue to ask and debate what changes we should battle for in the current system that best facilitate both better lives for children now and better opportunities to win more in the future. This suggests that power, not simply money or the delivery of services, is the most central question: how can educators, parents, communities, students, have and exercise greater authority and control, and to do so in ways that do not perpetuate or intensify inequalities among the people but rather expand an equitable commons in education?

In conclusion, I have tried to show how standardized testing evolved as an essential tool of the capitalist organization of education, particularly in its neoliberal stage, but reaching back before this current (and hopefully soon ended) phase. In the U.S., there appear now to be new spaces for struggle, but it will be very difficult as even those who want some positive changes in education are all too apt to remain confined within the concepts and logic of neoliberalism. Finally, within the context of struggles for democratic, socially inclusive but non-homogenous education, we must ask how to use evaluation, whose root word is value, in a healthy educational process and in efforts to both modify and overcome the current system.

Appendix: the U.S. Testing “system”

As a condition of receiving federal education funds, the federal government requires each state to assess all its students in grades 3- 8 and once in high school in reading and math, and once each in grades 3-5, 6-9 and 10-12 in science. These tests are controlled by the states, which almost always contract with private producers to make them. There is also the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which uses sampling systems to produce scores at the national and state levels. NAEP tests are administered at grades 4 and 8 in reading and math every other years, and states also must participate in them to receive federal funds. Other tests administered less frequently, including high school, and are not mandatory and often produce only national level data. The federal government also mandates the use of tests of English language acquisition for English language learners, and requires the administration of still more tests for students with disabilities. In both cases, the tests are state or locally selected. States can and do require many other tests, as do districts. States and districts can choose to require students to pass a test for high school graduation or for grade promotion. Tests are also often used in college and university admissions. The result is a patchwork of mediocre tests often used with high stakes. In 1988, FairTest determined there were about 100 million tests administered through college entrance.
With the advent of periodic tests required by many districts, there is no doubt there are many more standardized tests now in use. In Los Angeles, for example, teachers have reported that 15 to 25 percent of school days, depending on the grade, involve test administration (see www.utla.net).

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Notes

1. This paper is more extensive than the talk I delivered and has been updated in a few cases based on the discussions at the conference.

2. Dalla Costa, M., and James, S. (1972).The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press.

3. FairTest is a testing reform advocacy, non-profit organization. It works for fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools, and to end the misuses and flaws of testing practices that impede those goals. (It has many resources about testing, assessment and accountability on its website, http://www.fairtest.org.) As such, FairTest does not take positions on or focus on analyzing wider issues such as neoliberalism and capitalism. Therefore, the views on such wider topics expressed in this paper are mine, not those of FairTest.

4. See the appendix for a brief description of the testing “system” in the U.S.

5. The U.S. uses the term “liberal” to mean more socially or economically progressive, the opposite of conservative or reactionary – as distinguished from how “ neoliberal” is used in much of the world.

6. Frederiksen, N. (1994). “The Real Test Bias,” American Psychologist. March.

7. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. I do not fully subscribe to her overall analysis, but believe she is very correct that capitalism creates and uses disasters for its ends, as it is attempting to do with the current crisis of neoliberalism. For an analysis of different conceptions of neoliberalism, see “Introduction” to One No, Many Yeses, at http://www.midnightnotes.org/12intro.html.

8. I am not here denigrating the knowledge and skills needed for a vast array of occupations such as waitress or carpenter. However, the skills they use, as well as ones needed by citizens in general to be effective, as well as much knowledge and skills needed in academia, are generally not taught in schools. Indeed, under the testing regime, they are less likely to be taught.

9. See Neill, M. (1995). “Computers, Thinking and Schools in the ‘New World Economic Order,’” in Brook, J. and Boal, I., eds. . Resisting the Virtual Life. San Francisco: City Lights. Available at http://www.midnightnotes.org/MONTY4.html.

10. Many years ago, the political rock band Red Shadow performed “Free Market Election Day.”

11. The commons is historically the ownership and control over land and other resources by the community as a whole. Marx described the enclosure of the commons as the original or primary accumulation (Capital, Vol. I). In contemporary capitalist societies, we can describe social goods such as social security and schools as forms of commons, though they are typically under capitalist control.

12. See Neill (1995), op. cit.

13. For an analysis of school “reform” in Chicago, see http://www.fairtest.org/new-report-challenges-strategies-promoted-chicago-.

14. Given the history of racial segregation and discrimination in the US, the exclusion of students with disabilities, and numerous negative local examples of the misuse of power, I concur that the federal government must ensure the protection of individual and minority rights and push for greater equity. In this sense, the national government is an arena of struggle, as are local governments. Though the state is ultimately an instrument of class domination, the working class continues to battle for improvements. We cannot ignore either aspect of reality, requiring a complex politics fraught with tensions.