We deeply appreciate Professor Mark Garrison's thorough, analytical and clearly-delivered review essay of TMoE. Here is the Intro section, followed by a link to Education Review: A Journal of Book Reviews, where you can read the rest. jh & dw
Mark Garrison
D'Youville College
Buffalo, New York
Recently
I was asked to talk to a large group of area educators and parents about the
relationship between the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI) and the use of
student test scores on high stakes standardized tests to evaluate teachers and
principals – so-called valued-added models (VAMs). Public
criticism of this disfiguring of teacher evaluation and the Common Core testing
regime continues to grow across New York State and elsewhere, giving rise to
many public forums such as the one described below. More than 40,000 parents
reportedly opted their children out of New York’s Common Core tests this year. Many parents are
“refusing the tests” on the grounds that consistent and vocal public concerns
about the Regents Reform Agenda have been ignored (e.g., Strauss, 2013).
During the
discussion following my talk
linking the rise of the test-delivery Common Core regime and VAMs
to cuts to education funding and privatization, one teacher likened her
experience to being flushed down a toilet, “day after day,” struggling but
never being able to escape that dark vortex known as “education reform,” which,
she said, “sucks the life out of education” and renders any authentic work of
students and teachers “wasteful.” After
the crowd had left, the event organizer told me that a teacher sitting next to
him during the talk, “cried quietly for the first half hour.” When I asked why, he said: “The talk put
everything together for her, helped her understand the pain she had been
experiencing over the last decade.” In no small measure was my ability to
“bring everything together” based on having just finished reading Horn and
Wilburn’s volume, The Mismeasure of Education (MME). Readers should know
that MME is imbued with an activist spirit and so it seems imminently fitting
to introduce the book in the light of its role in my own work as a public
intellectual.
I’ve been studying and
writing about standardized testing, and VAMs in particular, for some time, so I
asked myself, “what was it about MME that proved so valuable to me?” The value
of MME for me – and I believe this will be the case for many readers – is the
manner in which it links the rise of test-based accountability policy to elite
ideologies and efforts to block public demands for equality of educational
opportunity, and demands
for
policies that foster social equality, more
generally.
Through its case study of the rise of VAMs
together such that I was more able than
before to effectively communicate an analysis to a public audience, one that
was both partisan – unabashedly in favor of defending and renewing the
democratic potential of public education – and eager for objective analyses of
the actual conditions, developments and facts related to the “mismeasure” of
the work of teachers and students.
In short, the value of MME
is how it makes the case that testing is political. It makes the case
that standards used to judge schools, teachers and students represent the
interests and values of those who establish them. For me, it is further proof
of the thesis outlined in my own work (Garrison, 2009) regarding the inherently
political and value-laden nature of academic standards and assessments and
their role in struggles between political factions and social classes. The Mismeasure
of Education will help readers understand that fights over testing
practices can be understood as means for sorting out larger political and
economic contradictions. Horn and Wilburn’s work, then, can be summarized as
presenting a case history and political analysis of
the
mismeasure of education. This is an analysis of
who does
and does not benefit from the systematic distortion of social reality and alteration
of the goals and control of public education that emerges from VAMs and
high-stakes testing more generally.
An
Objective Yet Partisan Analysis
Horn and Wilburn present their argument about
mismeasurement in four sections. While each stands
alone – expanding the pedagogical uses of the book –
each section contributes to an overall argument, guided
by a definite method of analysis. . . .
Read the review essay here.
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