Jeb Bush and "integrity that is unquestioned"

["James Horn" <jhorn@monmouth.edu>]

http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/
Monday, August 08, 2005
Jeb Bush and "integrity that is unquestioned"

The Palm Beach Post reports that Jeb Bush was sworn in on Friday by Maggie
Spellings as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board.
Exhibiting the sharp contrasts that can be found among siblings, Jeb
describes himself as " an aspiring policy nerd" and as "an amateur
psychometrician." But there is one strand of his thinking that puts him on
the same page with his brother--his insistence on the infallability of
tests as the true measure of learning. He is quoted, too, as claiming
infallability for the FCAT, the state test that Florida uses each year to
ethnically cleanse the losers in the testing bonanza that was once known
as school in Florida:

    "We're dispelling a lot of myths in our state about how kids can
learn... and the core of all of this is assessment. . . .Without an
assessment tool that has integrity that is unquestioned, you can't
challenge the basic assumptions."


Some readers may find good reason to remain skeptical about Bush's absurd
claim, particularly when taken together with less amateur psychometricians
such as James Popham, Professor Emeritus from UCLA, who spent more than 40
years studying and developing tests. At a conference I attended recently,
Popham described 90% of the tests used now to make high stakes decisions
on NCLB mandates as "junk." Read an excellent interview with Jim Popham
here. Popham still believes there is much to learned with good tests, but
he insists that the belief in tests as the true measure the school quality
of schools is folly:

    The most profound misuse of educational tests these days is to employ
a traditionally constructed standardized achievement test and base the
student's scores, use those scores, as a reflection of school quality.
These tests should not be used to evaluate school quality. And many
citizens think that should be done and many educators can't disabuse
them of that notion, because they don't know better.


If Florida teachers were to believe their governor, they would never know
better. Fortunately, Florida teachers are coming to understand the lunacy
of the state testing policy and the conscious intellectual and emotional
genocide that is being waged against children of poverty.

-- 
Jim Horn, PhD
Monmouth University

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can
only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system
seriously.  If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called
education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.  --E.
M. Forster