Testing, Commodification, And Students Who Don’t Give A Sh*t

Standardized tests are biased against students who don’t give a sh*t.  This is clearly a serious failure of American public education: school is supposed to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world, no one gives a sh*t.  But there’s a silver lining for dedicated educators such as yourself – reach out, make a difference, and teach students the importance of pretending to give a sh*t. (HT: Money Law).

The video probably caught my eye because I’ve been writing about standardized testing lately for a symposium volume at Wash U. (The live show was last spring.  You can read summaries of the presentations and responses here, here, and here.) 

My contribution, The Dark Side of Commodification Critiques: Politics And Elitism in Standardized Testing, responds to Kate Silbaugh’s comparison of the standardized testing literature to traditional debates about the commodifying effects of markets.  As regular Lounge readers know, I’m not a fan of commodification objections to markets (see, for example this post and this one).  It is, to my mind, an even less persuasive objection to standardized testing. 

Doubtless there are many problems, inefficiencies, and failures associated with standardized testing programs in our public schools.  Silbaugh identifies the usual suspects, including the flattening effect of standardization and “teaching to the test.” But far from demonstrating the failure of standardized testing, the commodification analogy primarily demonstrates the politically-driven and elitist nature of much of the standardized testing debate. 

Politics and elitism in commodification-like protests to standardized testing should not be terribly surprising.  Almost since their inception, commodification objections have held both an elitist flavor, and have been invoked for political gains whenever such arguments are more likely to resonate with audiences than narrower appeals to self-interest.  If standardized testing debates bear similarities to market commodification debates, it is only natural that the parallels extend to these traits as well.

For example, the insurance industry lobby frequently objects to commodifying or gambling on death through various secondary markets in life insurance, though annuities commodify and gamble on death in a similar fashion.   Coincidentally, secondary life insurance markets are an economic threat to the insurance industry, which priced existing premiums on an assumption that many insureds would allow policies to lapse or trade them in for a fraction of face value, rather than selling them on the secondary market to investors.   Similarly, the fertility industry defends its price controls on oocytes – the same type of professional price fixing agreement that has long been considered per se illegal in less politically charged industries – on commodification, among other, grounds.

Given the ease with which narrow self-interest can, in certain settings, be repackaged as broader commodification concerns, it is hardly surprising that many of the commodification-like objections to standardized testing emanate from educators themselves.  As Silbaugh notes, the entire point of the standardized testing program in public education was to establish a metric by which educators and districts could be held accountable for performance failures.    Not surprisingly, educators as a group prefer self-control to such accountability to outsiders.  Teachers and school districts alike have less autonomy and flexibility under the current standardized testing system and are now subject to more outside scrutiny.  Educators’ resistance to standardized testing is thus consistent with their own collective self-interest, and with their opposition to merit pay, vouchers, and a variety of other mechanisms that would subject educators and school systems to competitive forces or outside evaluation.

A second similarity between commodification objections to markets and those to standardized testing is their frequently elitist nature.  Kenneth Arrow raised this point in 1972, when comparing Richard Titmuss’s views on the impersonal altruism of the small number of blood donors in the United Kingdom to an “aristocracy of saints.”   Martha Nussbaum reaffirmed it when she argued that much commodification-based opposition to sex work fails to appreciate the “other realities of working life of which it is a part.”

Silbaugh mentions repeatedly that difficult-to-test topics such as art, music, physical education, critical thinking, and the like are being dropped from the curriculum in favor of those subjects more amenable to standardized testing, emphasizing that the burden falls hardest on poorer school districts, because more affluent suburban districts can afford to retain these subjects, while still attaining “adequate yearly progress.”   Assuming that it is true that art, music, critical thinking, and similar topics were systematically more likely to be included in the curricula of poorer school districts prior to the standardized testing movement, the empirical question of whether similarly situated students from poorer districts are better off learning art, music, and physical education than their more testable substitute topics remains open. 

The reality of differential educational funding across school districts in the United States necessarily means that poorer districts are faced with choices and trade-offs: choices among students, choices among subjects, and choices among the various means to deploy scarce resources.  Silbaugh’s argument that scarce time and resources are being spent on Subject A, rather than on Subject B, proves nothing in the absence of evidence that – given the necessity of choice – students would be better off learning B instead of A.  If children in poorer school districts are being deprived of valuable education opportunities, the problem would appear to lie with the differential funding of public education in the United States, and the consequent consistent poverty of some school districts, rather than with standardized testing. 

Though the analogy between commodification-like arguments against markets and against standardized testing is imperfect, the comparison yields more insights than Silabugh acknowledges. In particular, though Silbaugh concludes that her analysis demonstrates the failures of standardized testing, her analogy primarily reveals the politically-driven and elitist nature of the standardized-testing debate.

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Scott]

Thanks for posting this--I am very interested in this debate, and I was unaware that the symposium had happened. I will look out for the upcoming issue. I agree that the central issues in this debate are really issues about the large inequalities in funding among American school districts. However, there are interesting questions related to test-based accountability even assuming these inequalities. Not having read the primary article, I feel a little at a loss, but I have a couple of reactions to the post above.

I understand that one of Professor Silbaugh's points (as paraphrased above) is that lower-income school districts are harmed more by the crowding out of non-testable subjects from the curriculum. However, it is also true that most affluent school systems are succumbing to the pressure to spend much of their time (at least in the Spring) teaching to the test. In affluent school systems, this is likely because scores have essentially topped out at a point where further "progress" is nearly impossible. "Adequate yearly progress" is not a student-based metric, which might measure the learning gains a student may have accomplished in a given year--that would require two tests in a year. Rather, it is a school-based measure of the percentage of students in each disaggregated group who achieve a certain score level on the state test each year. There are several affluent school districts in each state where the achievement levels have been nearly 100% for years (especially in certain elementary schools), and at times, schools in these districts have been considered "failing" on the NCLB scale (even while being graded as "A" schools in the relevant state's accountability system) for failing to increase their passage rates. This, I think, creates a pathological obsession with aggregate score increases in affluent districts similar to that which we see in lower-income school districts.

Your point that "Silbaugh’s argument that scarce time and resources are being spent on Subject A, rather than on Subject B, proves nothing in the absence of evidence that – given the necessity of choice – students would be better off learning B instead of A," may address an either-or dichotomy presented in Silbaugh's paper, but this choice has never been central to the critiques of standardized testing-based accountability from the education scholars. Instead of thinking of the choice as "either teach A or B," which I think would, as you argue, require an empirical determination of the relative values of A and B to the student and society, it is better to think of the choice as one between "teaching only A, or teaching both A and B," which is a characterization more faithful to the change that happened as a result of the testing-based accountability movement. If both A and B are valuable, but only A is subject to easy and inexpensive measurement, then A crowds B out of the curriculum. For this phenomenon to be undesirable it is not necessary for B to be more valuable than A, or even for B to be as valuable as A. It suffices to say that both A and B have value to a student's education, and the value of music, critical thinking, and art (the "B" in your post) to a student's overall education has been established quite convincingly in the psychological literature. The more interesting question, I think, is whether it is better to teach only A, but teach it measurably effectively, than to teach both A and B and not know empirically whether either is being taught effectively. This latter question suggests its own answer, but only because a third option--teaching both A and B and measuring the effectiveness of all such teaching--would be a much, much more expensive approach, requiring individual evaluations of individual educators or students (e.g., portfolio assessment), rather than the mass bubbling of scan-tron forms.

[Kim Krawiec]

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Scott. The symposium was on "For Love or Money: Defining Relationships in Law and Life," and this was the only paper relating to education, so that may be why you missed it. Kate does discuss problems of flattening and teaching to the test in wealthier districts as well, but I don't recall a discussion of the specific point you raise -- that some affluent school districts with achievement levels of nearly 100% have been considered "failing" on the NCLB scale for failing to increase their passage rates. I, of course, wouldn't deny that this is a problem, but would simply contend that it has nothing to do with commodification per se, and instead is an implementation failure.

On the second point, I like your reframing of the question as “whether it is better to teach only A, but teach it measurably effectively, than to teach both A and B and not know empirically whether either is being taught effectively.” I may use that in the paper – I always hope that these blog discussions will generate comments that I can use in some way.

However, I don’t know that the question can so easily be reframed as “it is better to think of the choice as one between ‘teaching only A, or teaching both A and B.’” This seems to me to assume more than is in evidence (or, at least, of the evidence I’ve seen). I'm sure that we could all agree that it would be best if students learned both A and B. But teaching both A and B effectively (leaving aside for the moment questions of whether we can measure that effectiveness) appears to be something that many schools cannot do – both before and after standardized testing. Presumably there are many schools (indeed, many students) that must choose where to focus their energies and they are necessarily making trade-offs on a daily basis. The advent of the standardized testing movement means that they have chosen to focus their energies on one subset of knowledge. It seems to me that this particular critique thus needs to demonstrate that a focus on that subset of knowledge is inferior to the pre-testing status quo or, in the alternative, demonstrate that all schools have sufficient resources to effectively teach all subjects we might consider valuable to students’ education.