EQUALIZED OUTCOMES

Test-Makers Seek to Impose Radically New Structure on Schools 

Wednesday, June 2, 1993 

By Robert Holland 

The school restructuring debate has focused mainly on the correct-thinking, well-socialized students that ed biz has decided it wants to roll off the production lines. 

But somehow the educrats will have to test pupils to determine that they match the specification in the common cores of learning being adopted by Virginia and other states that are buying into Outcome-Based Education. 

Rest assured that testing is far from being just an after-thought.  In fact, the hand that controls the tests may well control the whole of American education. 

The leaders of the New Standards Project (NSP), in which Virginia is one of the 17 participating (and paying) states, have stated boldly that their aim is nothing less than "to develop a radically new approach to the assessment of student progress that would drive fundamental changes in what is taught and learned...." 

That statement came from NSP's working papers, which I obtained through a Freedom of Information request from the State Department of Education.  DOE anticipates paying $300,000 a year through 1995-96 to participate in this project. 

Located at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, NSP is a key player in the drive toward nationally prescribed standards and exams for schools, which looks like the final step to nationalization of education.   Under President Clinton's Goals 2000:  Educate America Act, the Department of Labor also would become more deeply involved with a new national board to set skill-certification standards for "occupational clusters" encompassing virtually every job in the country. 

Up to its old tricks, DOL already is seeking to guarantee equal outcomes on a group basis on those tests.  Lawrence Lorber, a Washington employment relations lawyer and former director of DOL's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, says that could be done only by using different cutoff scores by group or adjusting the scores of applicants. 

The latter practice is known as "[race or sex] norming," the workings of which were first exposed in this column in 1990 and which ostensibly was outlawed by the 1991 Civil Rights Act.  (That no doubt is a mere technicality to DOL's numbers crunchers." 

Lorber calls the use of scoring tricks in the name of fairness or equity "social engineering masquerading as science."  A review of the New Standards Project reveals a similar philosophical predisposition toward leveled outcomes -- only this time the victims will be bright pupils of all races whose progress will be retarded by a dumbed-down group standard. 

(Virginia bureaucracies seem to have a devilish fondness for these schemes.  In the early 1980's, the Virginia Employment commission helped DOL get the norming scam rolling.  And now the Department of Education  is supporting a plan to drive local curricula  through national tests.) 

The NSP paper condemned as hopelessly elitist "a testing system designed to sort out those who would enter the elite from those who would not."  So much for Thomas Jefferson's "aristocracy of merit."  Under the new dispensation, we will all meet one "mastery standard" (another term for OBE), no matter how many cracks we must take at the test. 

The purpose, the manifesto's authors frankly stated, "is to destroy the primary mechanisms of the sorting system in American education that have lowered expectations and limited opportunity for countless people over the years."  Thus, "Having one standard for everyone requires the abolition of tracking (ability grouping) -- the assignment of students to work that is more or less challenging based on imputed intelligence." 

In quest of universal mastery, they add, "we would have to explore ways to give students that fall behind more instructional time, more financial resources, a more appropriate curriculum, and better-prepared teachers."  This is Robin Hood education -- and the brainy (those of   "imputed intelligence") possess the "riches" to be redistributed downward. 

NSP's big guns are Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh and Marc Tucker, president of the National Center of Education and the Economy in Rochester, New York.  As further evidence of collaboration in imposing standards from on high, consider that Tucker recently testified in Washington in favor of DOL's national job skills board. 

Please note that through something called SCANS (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills), DOL already is wired into school restructuring (see today's players' chart).  SCANS is busily churning out work orders for the New American Child.  And some corporate moguls who quietly acquiesced in norming are leading cheers for this even grander egalitarian scheme. 

The CEOs' disillusionment with schools that send them too many unlettered graduates who don't even show up for work on time is understandable.  No doubt they hope the new system at least will give them malleable young people who can work in a group.  But shouldn't it matter that the feel-good approach will penalize real intellectual achievement? 

SCANS  has called for replacing report cards, for example, with student resume's, which would include teacher ratings of pupils' personal qualities.  Among SCANS "competencies" to be tested are "self-esteem" and "sociability." 

In short, supposedly hard-nosed capitalists -- gulled by government bureaucrats -- are buying into the progressivist pap of Ed-School and Ed-Central. Even more frightening is the totalitarian manner in which this bogus reform is being foisted on local school systems.    

NATIONAL TESTING:  THE PLAYERS 

DOE:  Department of Education

DOL:  Department of Labor

NEGP:  National Education Goals Panel

NCEST:  National Council for Educational Standards and Student Testing

NESAC:  Proposed education standards advisory council

NAGB:  National Assessment Governing Board

NAEP:  National Assessment of Education Progress

America 2000:  George Bush education initiative (Goals 200 under Bill Clinton)

NASDC:  New-American Schools Development Corporation

SCANS:  Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills

CCSSO:  Council of chief State School Officers

NBPTS:  National Board of Professional Teaching Standards

NSP:  New Standards Project

CB:  College Board 

Source:  The New Standards Project