by Sharon L. Nichols; David C. Berliner
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Product Description
For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue. Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this corruption, showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Locking the Doors, 2008-06-06
Something can be valid but at the same time irrelevant. The arguments presented here are based on research that I am not competent to refute. Let's stipulate that the findings are accurate. No doubt it is true and indeed would have to be true that the test results are skewed by issues of stress and fear. This is true at the Olympics and every other arena of competition. I can't see what the point is. No doubt schools and the individuals in them will feel pressure, just as a school orchestra must feel when invited to play at the state competition. Not auditioning is the only way to ensure one a peaceful state of mind. The anxieties students feel are built into educational competition. Anyone who tutors or teaches SAT-type exam preparation knows that the kids feel pressure. Of course, without it they wouldn't study. There's the rub. We had an educational system lacking standards and without accountability for years; that's what created the groundswell of support for this legislation. Nothing was going on out there. Gym teachers were teaching chemistry; history teachers doubled as baseball coaches who freelanced in the counseling office during their prep periods. The suggestion that something valuable and delicate is being destroyed by this test mania is true, but that refinement was killed long before NCLB came along. Teachers cry out, "Why won't they just let us teach!" My colleague used to teach the Vietnam War all year long instead of chronology of American history simply because he loved the subject and had a Vietnamese wife. He showed "Apocalypse Now" 15-20 during the school year to the same kids. Now administrators can't allow that sort of thing and don't. I had another friend who spent all day Monday telling her students about her weekend dates and asked them to vote on which man seemed most eligible. Time was being wasted, incompetent teachers were in the classrooms without credentials or knowledge and frequently with neither. This hasn't disappeared as a problem, but it is less blatant. NCLB is not just testing. One of its key components is requiring teachers to be qualified to teach the subject(s)to which they have been assigned. Such positions had for years been assigned on the basis of favoritism. Currying favor and staying on the "good side" of principals has been the code of the classroom samurai for decades. Positions were assigned as favors and rewards (and still are, I'm sure). NCLB has brought for the first time a measure of "maturity" and professionalism back to the schools. It has shaken things up and lent an air of improvement to the entire enterprise known here as "public education." All of this is due more to fear of losing funding than to the merits of the tests themselves, which are indeed rather awful. I believe the authors' argument that such testing to harmful is probably true, but the harm of not testing is even greater. For the first time in a very long time kids are being asked to learn something unrelated to the tastes and prejudices of their individual teachers. It is called knowledge.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Some Teach; Others Just Test, 2008-05-22
Many years ago an educator from Britain and I were discussing the direction that public education in America was taking. The signs of the "accountability" movement were becoming evident even then. After a while, my visitor remarked, "What a shame. In England, we don't just test, we teach." That judgment is more true today than ever in the history of American education. What a shame! We have created these tests, and now testing has supplanted teaching in our schools...unless of course you count "teaching the test" as actually teaching, which I do not.
Nichols and Berliner have sounded the wake-up call. Who will listen?
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Essential book for all members of congress who vote., 2007-10-02
Parents, teachers, principals, school board members and members of congress who vote for educational practices should be required to read this book before they impose these conditions on young children. This book is a must read.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A Troubling Take on High-Stakes Testings, 2007-08-15
The authors of this text make a very pointed and specific argument: that attaching high-stakes to test scores corrupts and invalidates the measure. The extent of cheating and malfeasance is found at the student, teacher, district, and state levels because of the enormous pressure put on all parties to raise standards according to the required standardized testing mandated by 2001's No Child Left Behind Act.
Nichols and Berliner describe an environment where schools have taken the power out of the teacher's hands to determine what should be taught. Instead, state standardized testing with high stakes (which is to say funding, employment status for teachers, graduation status for students, and school operability are at stake if certain benchmarks are not met) create an impetus for school administrators to narrow the curriculum to focus the school's energy on that which is being tested. Because there are such high stakes attached almost exclusively to the test results of the students, the authors argue that Campbell's law comes into play: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Their body of evidence includes news articles from across the country detailing a number of examples of such corruption, as well as interviews with educators who have witnessed the educational environment change firsthand. The examples can become repetitive, but that may be reason enough to be concerned about the unintended consequences of high-stakes accountability in education.
Perhaps most importantly, the authors do not suggest that accountability should be removed from the classroom. Instead, they insist that a more holistic approach should be taken with lower stakes applied to just test scores. It is an accessible read and very timely as this bill faces renewal. Recommended for parents and educators alike.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
A must read, 2007-06-09
This is perhaps the most important book to date on the perverse effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its mandates for high-stakes testing. The authors provide irrefutable evidence of the problems of a school accountability system which relies on a single indicator--test scores. They explain how when a single social indicator is used to measure something, it corrupts the very thing it is attempting to measure. The authors provide example after example of how the pressure to raise test scores has led to questionable ethical behavior which is harmful to students, schools, and our nation as a whole.
Despite the depressing content, the authors write in a highly accessible and entertaining style, and even manage to interject a bit of humor to lighten the heavy burden which comes when one comtemplates the implications of their findings.
It is a must read for all educators, parents, and policy makers. Indeed, I hope the latter will read this book and make changes the authors suggest for a more reasonable acountability system.
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