Unequal By Design

High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality

Wayne Au

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000619836
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality critically examines the deep and enduring problems within systems of education in the U.S., in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing.

Updates to the new edition include new chapters that focus on: the role of schools and standardized testing in reproducing social, cultural, and economic inequalities; the way high-stakes testing is used to advance neoliberal, market-based educational schemes that ultimately concentrate wealth and power among elites; how standardized testing became the dominant tool within our educational systems; the numerous technical and ideological problems with using standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools; the role that high-stakes testing plays in the maintenance of white supremacy; and how school communities have resisted high-stakes testing and used better assessments of student learning.

Parents, teachers, university students, and scholars will find Unequal By Design useful for gaining a broad, critical understanding of the issues surrounding our over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing in the U.S. through up-to-date research on testing, historical and contemporary examples of the struggles over such tests, and information about how testing has fostered the privatization of public education in the U.S.

1 ENDURING EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

DOI: 10.4324/9781003005179-1

There is something special about high-stakes, standardized test scores. They almost hold a magical quality, because they so effortlessly offer us easy to understand answers to hard questions about education. The numbers that standardized tests produce are beautifully simplistic, and we are easily seduced by the steady firmness, the solidness, the concreteness that there is something real, something that we can reach out and grab onto that tells us what is happening inside classrooms. As a country, we in the U.S. love them. We can watch test scores rise and fall like the stock market, or perhaps more fittingly, watch them rise or fall as if these scores were trending on social media. Moreover, we believe in the power of high-stakes, standardized tests. They can fix things. When serious people in serious political positions say serious things about what is wrong with education, they propose serious policies that use high-stakes, standardized tests to fix what ails us. This is especially true when it comes to the crossroads of race, class, and educational inequality, but also holds true in areas of disability and language as well. Consider the following:

• In 2002, former U.S. President George W. Bush said, “Education is the great civil rights issue of our time” (CNN, 2002, n.p.).
• In 2004, former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige proclaimed that “[The educational achievement gap] is the civil rights issue of our time” (Feinberg, 2004, n.p.).
• In 2010, former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan opined, “Education is the Civil Rights Movement of our generation” (2010, n.p.).
• In 2011, former U.S. President Barack Obama stated that “Education is the civil rights issue of our time” (Cooper, 2011, n.p.).
• In 2017, former U.S. President Donald Trump declared that “Education is the civil rights issue of our time” (Halper, 2017, n.p.).

Aside from the laziness of speech writers, there is something important to see here: Regardless of presidential administration and regardless of political party or political position, for close to 20 years there has been a consensus that some imperative relationship between racial equality and schools exists, one that warrants major policy arguments to try and spur the nation into action. Equally important to note is that, in response to the grand claims about education and equality, the bipartisan answer has been the same: More high-stakes, standardized tests. Whether it was No Child Left Behind, the Race to the Top initiative and the Common Core State Standards, or the Every Student Succeeds Act, high-stakes, standardized tests have continuously been the main policy tool (perhaps “bludgeon” might be the more appropriate word) for federal education policy in the United States (Amrein-Beardsley, 2014; Karp, 2003, 2012, 2013, 2016). The path to all that racial equality is apparently paved with the magic of high-stakes tests.

We imbue high-stakes, standardized tests with these special qualities because in the United States, we tend to “fetishize” schools, education, and students. That is to say, we pretend they sit alone, by themselves and disconnected, from everything around them. We tell students that it doesn’t matter if they are facing housing insecurity, are hungry, or in need of regular medical, dental, and mental healthcare. Instead, they are told that all they need is “grit” and a “growth mindset” to do well in schools (Love, 2019b; Young, 2021). We tell teachers and schools similar fables: The resources you have do not matter. Access to state-of-the-art technology, quality curriculum, science equipment, musical instruments, art supplies, playgrounds, world languages, reliable internet, sports equipment, and decent school-food doesn’t matter. Leaking ceilings, lead-free water, asbestos wrapped pipes, broken windows, and broken desks don’t matter (see, e.g., Hanushek, 2016). If you just teach hard enough, using the right techniques, and Teach Like a Champion (Lemov, 2010), schools and teachers – just like their students – can overcome anything to achieve educationally.

Of course, as I discuss in great detail here in this book, we know these arguments to be, following Frankfurt (2006), absolute “bullshit.” While the COVID-19 pandemic has been obviously horrendous for all of us around the world, one thing it did do here in the U.S. is it collapsed the space that so many believed exists between schools and society – functionally rendering the idea that education sits apart from social and economic conditions as laughably false. As schools were physically closed, schooling moved into our homes, and many were suddenly confronted by the reality that the health and well-being of communities and families was central to students’ educational experiences. The fact that the working class and families of color were being hit hardest by COVID-19 in terms of sickness, death, being forced to continue working in high exposure “essential” jobs to survive, and were experiencing high rates of job loss, illustrated the ongoing structural disparities in this country with regards to access to adequate health-care, viable employment, and livable wages (Betancourt, 2020; Yee, 2021). As families struggled with these issues, it became undeniable that students working at home, and later with the return to schools, were also dealing with these issues in their education (Alvarez, 2020). In effect, because of the pandemic, we could no longer pretend that students’ learning conditions were any different from social and economic conditions in their homes and communities. Of course, the pandemic didn’t stop the Biden Administration from requiring states to give standardized tests anyway (Au, 2021b), because, I guess, testing is more important than individual and community health … but I digress.

While the coronavirus collapse of the perceived space between schools and society may have surprised some, progressive and critical scholars of education have argued for decades that schools have always been deeply connected to the social relations that exist “outside” of them, even if these scholars may have disagreed as to exactly how those connections work (Apple & Au, 2015). This relationship between schools and society, and the role that schools play in either reproducing or interrupting dominant social relations, is central to this book, because as I argue throughout, high-stakes, standardized tests are fundamental to the reproduction of inequality. As such, it is important that we revisit critical perspectives on social reproduction in educational theory.

Social Reproduction in Critical Educational Theory

For 100 years or more, we’ve known that schools in the U.S. have reproduced inequitable social and economic relations along the lines of class, race, nation, language, culture, gender, and other aspects of difference (Apple, 2012; Au et al., 2016). To account for this phenomenon, much of the early work in critical educational theory drew upon a legacy of Marxist analysis in some form, because that analysis offered a political economy of schooling that explained how institutions are tied to capitalist inequalities. Writing in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx (1968a) famously wrote:

In the social production of their life, men [sic] enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men [sic] that determines their being, but, one the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

(p. 183)

These four sentences outline what is commonly referred to as the base/super-structure model in Marxism, where the “legal and political superstructure” rises out of the “relations of production” that make up the base “economic structure of society.” Marx’s formulation, having been interpreted in a variety of ways, has proved useful (if not controversial) for activists and scholars interested in understanding how social, cultural, and institutional inequalities relate to capitalist economic relations. Consequently, critical educational theorists have made use of Marx’s conceptualization, or some related derivative, to analyze educational inequality in terms of economic inequality (Au, 2018; see also, De Lissovoy, 2022).

There was perhaps no more significant text in shaping the debate about the relationship between schools and society among critical education scholars than Bowles and Gintis’ (1976), Schooling in Capitalist America: Education Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. In their book, Bowles and Gintis argue for a “correspondence principle” of educational relations (also sometimes referred to as “correspondence theory”), where, “schooling has contributed to the reproduction of the social relations of production largely through the correspondence between school and class structure” (p. 130). They go on to explain in more detail that in their theorizing:

The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system … through the structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production. The structure of social relations in education not only inures the student to the discipline of the work place, but develops the types of personal demeanor, modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identifications which are crucial ingredients of job adequacy. Specifically, the social relationships of education – the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work – replicate the hierarchical division of labor.

(p. 131)

Even while still recognizing that there was some kind of relationship between capitalist inequalities and school inequalities, Critical education theorists sharply criticized Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence principle for ignoring the role of teachers, culture, and ideology in schools, being too mechanical and overly economistic, and neglecting students’ and others’ resistance to dominant social relations (see, e.g., Apple, 1980, 1981; Carlson, 1988; Cole, 1988; Giroux, 1980, 1983; Sarup, 1978; Sharp, 1980). In their interpretation, Arnot and Whitty (1982) explain:

[T]he political economy of schooling as presented by Bowles & Gintis … failed to describe and explain classroom life, the conflicts and contradictions within the school and the distance and conflict between the school and the economy. Further, it could not account for the variety of responses of teachers and pupils to the structures of the school – some of which were liable to threaten the successful socialisation of the new generation.

(p. 98, original emphasis)

Admittedly, when I was a graduate student, I too embraced these critiques of Bowles and Gintis (1976), and in several publications I even went on to label their “correspondence principle” as mechanical and overly deterministic (see, e.g., Au, 2006, 2008; Au & Apple, 2009). It wasn’t until I later revisited Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles & Gintis, 1976) for my book, A Marxist Education (Au, 2018), that I realized that I, and most of their neo-Marxist critics, were mistaken in our treatment of their analysis. For instance, in their introduction Bowles and Gintis (1976) very clearly explained that schools are sites of contradiction and resistance to capitalism, where they write:

[T]hough the school system has effectively served the interests of profit and political stability, it has hardly been a finely tuned instrument of manipulation in the hands of socially dominant groups. Schools and colleges do indeed help to justify inequality, but they also have become arenas in which a highly politicized egalitarian consciousness has developed among some parents, teachers, and students. The authoritarian classroom does produce docile workers, but it also produces misfits and rebels. The university trains the elite in the skills of domination, but it has also given birth to a powerful radical movement and critique of capitalist society…. Education in the United States is as contradictory and complex as the larger society; no simplistic or mechanical theory can help us understand it.

(p. 12)

Later in their text, they go on to admit that, “these reproduction mechanisms have failed, sometimes quite spectacularly” (p. 129), and explain how both the “internal dynamic of the education system” and “popular opposition” have countered the school’s reproduction of capitalist relations (p. 129). Additionally, Bowles and Gintis spend significant time discussing freedom schools, equal education, and the potentials of revolutionary reforms, which they argued must be tied to mass movements for social change (p. 246). It turns out that Bowles and Gintis were not the mechanical, deterministic theorists that so many, myself included, charged them with being.¹

Despite this reality, neo-Marxists and others cast Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles & Gintis, 1976) as a prime example of what they believed were mechanical, deterministic flaws of Marxist analyses of education, and Bowles and Gintis’ arguments became a, “straw-man against which more subtle and sophisticated accounts of the relationship between schooling and society can be favourably compared” (Hargreaves, 1982, p. 109). For this reason and others, including strands of anti-Marxism (McLaren & Jaramillo, 2010), in what they viewed as a corrective to this perceived determinism, neo-Marxists turned to Gramsci’s (1971) conception of “hegemony” and Althusser’s (1971) concept of “relative autonomy” to argue instead that individuals within schools had agency and consciousness which allows them to mediate and resist the dominant social relations reproduced through institutions (Apple, 1982, 1995; Gottesman, 2016).

Gramsci (1971), the Italian communist credited with the most elaborated conceptual formulation of hegemony, suggests that power...