Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Gertrude and Claudius" by John Updike
In his 19th novel, Updike spins a tale of feverish and furtive sex and death in a masterly prequel to "Hamlet."
By John Freeman
[02/09/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Faithful for now
Does my crush on another woman mean there's something wrong with my marriage?
By Garrison Keillor
[02/08/00]

Reviews
"S.: A Novel About the Balkans" by Slavenka Drakulic
A fierce novel brings home the horrors of the Bosnian war -- rape, torture and the sexual slavery of Muslim women.
By Brigitte Frase
[02/08/00]

Bogus bride
The University of Arizona Press passed off "I Married Wyatt Earp" as a historical document. It's not.
By Andrew Richard Albanese
[02/08/00]

Reviews
"Two Moons" by Thomas Mallon
A beautiful but heavy-handed new novel by the author of "Henry and Clara" evokes a post-Civil War Washington of scheming politicians and love-struck astronomers.
By Christopher Shea
[02/07/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But officials at the College Board argue that any standardized test will be abused. "I think there's probably more manipulation by schools on state tests than there is on our SAT test," says Beth Robinson, who handles student-disability issues for the College Board. Robinson says that a California exit exam won't compare with applicants from other states and says that the furor over wealthy families exploiting the learning disability label makes "a mountain out of a molehill." According to Robinson, such incidents have declined in the past three years, taking account of the fact that the overall number of tests has risen. "And it doesn't matter what test you're taking," she adds. "If people can find a way to give their kid an advantage, that family will do it, whether it's the SAT or something else."

In his new book, "Standardized Minds," journalist Peter Sacks argues that standardized testing is an invalid measuring stick. Sacks describes how former school Superintendent Rudy Crew fooled most of Tacoma, Wash., into thinking he'd conjured up an educational miracle when the city's dismal test scores spiked to improbably high levels. Tacoma is a working-class town with high unemployment, but Crew declared that social conditions were no excuse for low numbers. "I refuse to accept that students are not capable of doing the work," Crew said. He then engineered a set of high scores by ordering that grade-school kids be taught intensively toward Washington's comprehensive test of basic skills.

The experiment succeeded, for a season. Test scores soared, the town rejoiced and Crew, who had delivered on the bottom line, got a renewed contract and a $10,000 raise. Later that year, the New York City school system offered Crew a $195,000 salary and an expensive home to be its chancellor. After Crew moved east, Tacoma test scores plummeted and never recovered. Since Crew wasn't open about his tactics, residents felt tricked.

"I call it buying achievement," Sacks said in a phone interview. "And it seems to me that [test-score] achievement that's bought in this way is so ephemeral, it's kind of a fraud on taxpayers."

In any case, Crew was sly enough to realize that parents, universities, school boards and newspapers respond to test scores the way shareholders scrutinize profit margins. Late last year, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani forced Crew out of office after a long feud.

Sacks thinks this "corporate model" of measuring minds is false. "It's kind of a losing argument to say that we just need to get rid of all standardized tests," Sacks says. "But in the book, I do argue that we need to create a new paradigm of merit, based on evidence of actual accomplishment." He says evidence from SAT-optional schools like Bates College in Maine shows that a more well-rounded (and expensive) admissions strategy -- using grades, essays, portfolios and interviews -- brings in freshman classes that are more diverse in race and class and stronger at maintaining high grade-point averages. The same trend exists not just at private colleges with small application pools but at large public institutions that have de-emphasized standardized tests.

"At least in the college admissions context," says Sacks, "schools and counselors can finally stop using the excuse that test scores are the best measurement. This is the richest nation on Earth: Maybe we can hire a few more admissions counselors" to give applicants more personalized attention.

State schools such as the University of Texas and Boalt Hall, UC-Berkeley's law school, have expanded their admissions process in the past few years. The death of affirmative action in those states led to embarrassingly homogeneous freshman classes, and the schools had no choice but to stop using standardized testing as a rigid bureaucratic filter. And the recent mini-scandal over pseudo learning-disabled students may lead to more attention paid to applicants' achievements during high school, at least in the UC system. To Sacks, however, it's a tiny development. "Scrutinizing whether somebody is truly disabled gets into such minutiae," he says. "You have to ask the larger question: What are the tests really telling us in the first place?"
salon.com | Feb. 9, 2000

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon