educational standards and deliberation

Standards

and testing are hugely important in k-12 education these days. Meanwhile,

many people who are interested in improving American democracy would like to make

it more "deliberative." In a deliberative democracy, the public would

rule on the basis of one person, one vote, but with as much informed discussion

as possible before any vote.

Educational standards can be beneficial for

deliberative democracy. They are public statements of expectations for students

and schools, issued by accountable democratic bodies, and subject to debate. Standards

can be good or bad for education (depending on what they contain), but they seem

completely compatible with public deliberation and popular sovereignty. Testing,

on the other hand, is problematic from this perspective. Tests must be designed

by small groups in private. They can’t be public documents and still function

well as assessments. The designers of tests tend to be specialists, since designing

good instruments is a difficult, technical task. Thus experts have considerable

power and are held accountable to professional or technical norms, rather than

public judgment.

The risk of tests for deliberative democracy is clearest

in the case of norm-referenced exams (such as the SAT). To design a norm-referenced

test, experts write possible test questions almost randomly and try them out on

small samples of students. For the actual test, they retain those trial questions

that statistically correlated with past questions asked on the same test (i.e.,

those questions that the high-scorers tend to answer correctly). This is a strictly

technical approach that appears to avoid any judgments about what is important

to learn. But of course such judgments are made implicitly, since any test must

assess some skills or bodies of knowledge and not others. As a result, exams like

the SAT have powerful social effects, yet the public doesn’t control, and cannot

even debate, their content.

Such tests are bad for public deliberation.

Standards are potentially good. The problem is that we often don’t know how to

enforce standards without tests, and unenforceable standards are not good

for either education or democracy.

(By the way, I have been

asked to announce: "After a mini cyber-disaster, Amitai

Etzioni Notes is back up and running.")

One thought on “educational standards and deliberation

  1. JOCE JESSON

    High standards is a meaningless idea. The key idea in standards is judgement. Who makes the judgement and against what ideas.

    Standards can be norm referenced or idiosyncratic.

    Learning anything is complex so that any testing regime will only be able to concern some knowledge.

    Those opposed to standards are often concerned about these questions, whose ideas are valid, what knowlede counts, how are the results used, and what are the unintended consequences

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