Does the Economic Fate of a Nation Rest on its Test Scores?

In December 2010, the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results from were released. Evaluating 15-year-olds from 65 countries, PISA is touted as the most comprehensive study to test and rank students internationally. As in past years, the 5233 public and private school U.S. students tested scored in the average range.

As before, the apoplectic reaction of both pundits and government officials follows a predictable and faulty line of reasoning when looking at perceived international achievement gaps. It goes something like this: Public education is in a state of crisis. In order to avert the eventual economic ruin that will follow “middling”-range test scores, we must speed up school reform efforts and look to those who have higher scores, as models of superior educational systems. At the alleged root of the problem are complacent educators who are not willing or able to hold high expectations of their students or deliver high-quality instruction. The putative solution to the “crisis” is to hold educators “accountable” through incentives, punishment, and mandates, such as publishing school test scores, privatizing public education, replacing the school staff in low-performing schools, and using “performance”-based teacher pay. So the rhetoric goes.

If low scores lead to inferior economic performance, then those nations who score higher than the U.S. on international tests should be doing better on indicators of economic success. In 2007, researcher K. Baker compared international test results since their advent in 1964, with seven indicators of national success, including economic growth, productivity, and creativity. He found that “a certain level of educational attainment, as reflected in test scores, provides a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important…” The bottom line is that, beyond this platform, it is bad policy to pursue gains in test scores, diverting resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of economic success.

On the 2009 PISA, both South Korea and Shanghai-China were two of the highest scorers. Yet they have GDP’s per capita below the average measured by PISA’s organizational body. The two Swiss-based organizations that rank nations on global competitiveness both rank the U.S. #1 again, the position it has held for a number of years. In 2008, when journalist F. Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why high scoring Singaporean students seem to fade when they became adults, the Minister answered that their children lacked what he thought America excelled in – creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge – factors of course not measured by the much-valorized tests.

Author Yong Zhao, born and raised in China, in making comparisons between educational systems in European and Asian countries notes that centralized, standardized, test-driven countries like China and Singapore are attempting to get rid of the homogenization that the U.S. is now seeking to implement. They are, in fact, looking to the US to determine how to get their children to think.

It is easier to blame educators than to look at our real problems – like the effects of poverty on children and the simplistic reforms that are not working. Policy makers should be talking about the less publicized PISA findings such as: (1) Schools that compete for students through charters, tax credits or vouchers do not yield higher scores; (2) Private schools do no better than public schools once family wealth factors are considered; (3) 20% of U.S. performance is attributed to social inequity, far higher than in other nations – inequitable and inadequate financial resources resulting in nearly a year’s lack of growth, and (4) Schools with greater autonomy score higher.

Throughout the history of schooling in the U.S., schools have been routinely charged to carry out the dominant societal and political ideologies of the day. As historian W. Reese points out, when solutions to intractable problems that originate outside of school fail – poverty, racial and social injustice – schools are looked to as the source of the problems and educational reform ensues with vigor. Until educational policy is able to look at the economic and political conditions which are the real source of our educational problems, we are likely to continue our test-score fetishism.

Lynne Scalia is the Superintendent/Principal of Monforton School District.
Joseph Scalia III is the Director of Northern Rockies Psychoanalytic Institute.

And by “played into the hands of ‘greedy and selfish teachers unions’” I meant “played into the hands of those who already believe that their are ‘greedy and selfish teachers unions.’

Did I mention he went to all public schools, and currently attends Woodside High School in Mountain View, the same high school Guggenheim derided in his film?

I forwarded to the parents list at my son’s school. There has been a heated debate between parents who want to punish teachers and complain incessantly of the unions and others who try and call attention to the overall context of a war on teachers and on public workers in general.

This charter school movement has so many similar characteristics of the tea party movement, and that worries me too.
Thanks!

1. How does a nation that once publicly reviled torture come to accept it as an unfortunate necessity?

The question is broad and I think the issue needs to be viewed in smaller groups and communities to understand the mechanisms involved. Small groups of people conditioned by the same influences will tend to adopt the same structures of behavior that the overall society is living under. A nation functions like cults and cults function like any hierarchic structure with a power at its center dictating the rules of the game. They both have their particular agenda and structures. To overcome the mechanisms, each individual would need to confront the “human” with the agenda and discard the inhuman from the practices it tends to justify and reproduce. That would be one aspect worth exploring much further.

Another aspect is the fact that we are moving from the fascist- dictatorial- authoritarian forms of government towards more democratic, individualistic consciousness and centralized power is being challenged by the power of the people still weakly and in great disadvantage as Mr. Assange and Mr. Manning prove in the personal sphere but still receiving strong enough support for the cause: freedom of expression.

If you look at the cult phenomenon you will find that, like in society, the inner circle of the guru in power tends to support his or her power through forms and regulations on how, what, where, when, why and with whom anything can take place. In regular society what ever is not regulated is outlawed. The structure of power and its hierarchies immediately condition each individual that enters the group and the gradual brainwashing and conditioning necessary for the process of adaptation and obedience begins to take place until the adepts have surrendered enough to commit suicide en masse if the guru so orders. Jonestown is only one of the many cults in which this process has taken place.

Physical torture is only one form of torture. As we develop more consciosness, we realize more deeply that torture is everything that stunts human development in an individual as much as in society. The hierarchic conditioning of individuals to repetitive activities that don’t allow for their individual development as “creators”, that is, wherever the creativity of the human being is thwarted and limited to a repetitive job in which the individual is nothing more than “another” in the mass of people necessary for indiscriminate production, development is thwarted. From the moment individuals accept to play the role of mechanical production proper of mass production, they submit their human capacities to extreme limitations and with them their will to the hierarchic order. Maintaining such order is the role of those in power who profit and live of the status quo. The irony of the plot is that it is as inhuman and damaging for those who submit to the work as for those who live on it because the practical outcome is that neither actually develop human capacities or creativity, they limit themselves to repeating the same role more psychologically numbed in each generation consuming and working to consume without properly developing and numbed to the violence exerted on anyone threatening the status quo. Life becomes a digestive process of producing and consuming without a human aim. The intermediaries that make the system work and live on it are economically just barely more economically comfortable than those in the lower echelon so the only ones who truly profit enough to be allowed to expand their own creativity are the owners. Both the middle and the lower class become locked in the production for production game without a human objective and strongly protecting the status quo because they are instinctively dependent on it. These intermediaries who are so strongly dependent on such a status quo for their living are strongly susceptible to having the role and the capacity to implement any form of coercion necessary to maintain the status quo. Without their fear, the system would collapse and their fear is supported by their ignorance of the overall structures -the system lives on such ignorance or the unconsciousness of the whole. The military, (or the huge number of still young and “idealistic” people are easily manipulated into supporting the system like people in cults are manipulated through “idealistic” visions), has the role of maintaining the structures in place so it is no surprise the actual physical torture is deployed by them. Those who survive military life have to do so through giving their own self up so the numbness to other people’s suffering is very strong. They have themselves much suffered to be able to belong to that institution. The middle class maintains the psychological torture by “firing” the people unwilling to submit to the system and re-enacting in their lives the role of the “authority” that they represent but can never practically achieve.