A Seat at the Table: Teachers Reclaiming Assessment through Rethinking Accountability.

Distrust of teachers is carefully nurtured by the testing industry to keep the present educational power structure intact. Under that power structure, students are shaped to the specifications of experts whom they will never meet and who may never have set foot in a classroom. That situation has got to change, Mr. Gallagher warns. THE EDUCATION report card for my home state of Nebraska in the spring of 1999 was mixed, according to Education Week. While children in the state ranked among the top 10 nationally in most academic categories, Nebraska nonetheless garnered only a C. Why? Largely because it does not administer statewide, standardized assessments and so is "lagging behind" in accountability.1 Both those reporting this verdict and most of the state and local officials receiving it seem to be resigned to it as a sure but unsurprising sign that we have more work to do to "catch up" with the rest of the country. It does not seem to strike most observers as odd that, although students' performance is high, the state's marks are only average. Until Nebraska develops statewide tests, it will continue to receive low grades, irrespective of what our students are doing. This kind of press may well propel the state to abandon its long-held commitment to local assessment and fall in line with the national movement toward state standardized tests. This report and its handling demonstrate the extent to which educational tests have become "common sense. " To use a term proposed by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, educational testing is "hegemonic" - that is, it manufactures consent by presenting itself (or being represented as) "obvious. "2 Although standardized tests came under intense fire for a short time in the 1970s, we have returned to this practice with a fervor perhaps greater than at any other time since schools in the United States began making extensive use of standardized tests in the 1930s.3 Even many educators who have long understood the limitations and outright injustices of standardized testing and the testing industry claim that the time has passed when resistance to testing is useful. For instance, Edward White, a professor of English at California State University, claims that writing teachers must collaborate with "the assessment community" or risk losing control over programs, resources, and "national goals for writing. " In the final analysis, White argues, we have only two choices with respect to tests produced by the assessment community: "we can ignore them in the vain hope that they will go away, or we can participate in them in an informed way to make them as good as possible. "4 Surely there is something to be gained by adopting White's approach; this has been an important tactic of the "authentic assessment" movement, which has encouraged the use of alternatives to standardized tests in California, Kentucky, New York, and Vermont, among other places.5 To be sure, advocates of authentic assessment - who press for assessment programs that ask students to engage in and be evaluated on meaningful "real-world" activities such as writing for real readers or conducting viable scientific experiments - have helped the "assessment community" to develop kinder, gentler assessments. At the same time, I think it is dangerous to be too sanguine about the prospects for reforming the assessment community and disrupting the commonsense script for education reform, in which schools are cast as damsels in distress, remote experts are cast as heroic saviors, and teachers are written out of the production altogether. We need to confront the fact that, finally, the persistence of the "crisis in education" is attributable in large part to two factors: the profit margins of the testing industry that maintains the crisis and the cultural distrust of teachers that the testing industry, along with the political and education establishments, endorses. After all, those involved in educational testing constitute more than a "community"; they form a large and growing industry. …