Great Column About Peter Sacks

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@EARTHLINK.NET>]

                 TEST EFFORT IS A DUMB SOLUTION
                 Denver Post -- Februay 20, 2001
                         by Diane Carman
                    Denver Post Columnist

    Feb. 20, 2001 - The standardized testing movement is "an educational
fraud hoisted on taxpayers." It dumbs down education, perpetuates racist
attitudes and undermines the most important element of the learning
process: student motivation.
    But it accomplishes one important thing. It gives the American
public the illusion of a quick fix to social problems they don't much
like to contemplate.
    Peter Sacks doesn't mince words. The author of "Standardized Minds:
The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change
It" has evidence that standardized testing produces exactly the opposite
of what it promises.
    Instead of delivering a more highly skilled workforce, better able
to compete and innovate in the global market, it diminishes the
real-world value of education by reducing it to a limited set of
superficial, repetitive, abstract exercises. And instead of giving
children a ticket out of poverty, it brands them, their schools and
their teachers as failures.
    "We all know that some schools have a boatload of trouble in this
society," Sacks said. "The real problems in our educational system can
be traced to the gaping disparities in economics, class and race. The
rates of poverty, educational levels of parents ... and the social and
demographic characters of families all are outside the power of the
schools to fix."
    And going back as early as World War I and the eugenics movement,
Sacks contends, "tests traditionally have been used in ways to punish
the poor, recent immigrants and minorities, and to serve as a tool for
the elite to maintain their entrenched power."
    As for real improvement in academic skills, there's no evidence that
the testing paradigm delivers.
    Sacks studied the Tacoma school district in Washington in the 1990s,
when its superintendent launched a campaign to improve student test
scores.
    By repeatedly drilling kids with the kinds of questions they could
expect, the average scores jumped 21 points for fourth-graders and 13
points for eighth-graders between the fall of 1994 and a spring re-test
in 1995.
    If actual language and math skills had improved so dramatically,
these same students could be expected to perform at the consistently
higher level the following year. However, once the teachers stopped
teaching to the test, the scores returned to previous levels. "Those
gains were phony because they didn't last," Sacks said.
    Sacks traces the origins of the current testing trend to "A Nation
at Risk." The 1983 report, produced in the midst of an economic
recession, painted a grim picture of Americans falling behind the
Japanese and the Germans in the world economy.
    It couldn't have been more wrong, Sacks said.
    By the 1990s, the American economy was "an amazing jobs machine" and
the supposedly inferior American workers were the most productive in the
world.
    Sacks considers the testing movement "political propaganda." "And
right now, it's entrenched. It's like an alien from outer space that
just won't die."

Sacks will appear March 4 at the Rocky Mountain Book Festival.

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