Standards<\/p>\n
and testing <\/b>are hugely important in k-12 education these days. Meanwhile,<\/p>\n
many people who are interested in improving American democracy would like to make<\/p>\n
it more "deliberative." In a deliberative democracy, the public would<\/p>\n
rule on the basis of one person, one vote, but with as much informed discussion<\/p>\n
as possible before any vote. <\/p>\n
Educational standards can be beneficial for<\/p>\n
deliberative democracy. They are public statements of expectations for students<\/p>\n
and schools, issued by accountable democratic bodies, and subject to debate. Standards<\/p>\n
can be good or bad for education (depending on what they contain), but they seem<\/p>\n
completely compatible with public deliberation and popular sovereignty. Testing,<\/p>\n
on the other hand, is problematic from this perspective. Tests must be designed<\/p>\n
by small groups in private. They can’t be public documents and still function<\/p>\n
well as assessments. The designers of tests tend to be specialists, since designing<\/p>\n
good instruments is a difficult, technical task. Thus experts have considerable<\/p>\n
power and are held accountable to professional or technical norms, rather than<\/p>\n
public judgment. <\/p>\n
The risk of tests for deliberative democracy is clearest<\/p>\n
in the case of norm-referenced exams (such as the SAT). To design a norm-referenced<\/p>\n
test, experts write possible test questions almost randomly and try them out on<\/p>\n
small samples of students. For the actual test, they retain those trial questions<\/p>\n
that statistically correlated with past questions asked on the same test (i.e.,<\/p>\n
those questions that the high-scorers tend to answer correctly). This is a strictly<\/p>\n
technical approach that appears to avoid any judgments about what is important<\/p>\n
to learn. But of course such judgments are made implicitly, since any test must<\/p>\n
assess some skills or bodies of knowledge and not others. As a result, exams like<\/p>\n
the SAT have powerful social effects, yet the public doesn’t control, and cannot<\/p>\n
even debate, their content.<\/p>\n
Such tests are bad for public deliberation.<\/p>\n
Standards are potentially good. The problem is that we often don’t know how to<\/p>\n
enforce<\/i> standards without tests, and unenforceable standards are not good<\/p>\n
for either education or democracy.<\/p>\n
\n(By the way, I have been<\/p>\n