Expert Witness on Education - Bangor Baptist Church vs. State of Maine; pg2

Worse still, the studies do not compare our teacher certification maze against entirely different formulas for getting good teachers—Japan’s, for instance, which according to videotaped lessons from several nations, produces very skillful schoolteachers, generally far more competent than ours. Ignoring arrangements like Japan’s in an analysis of our certification system’s golden achievements is like excluding players over six feet tall from a study showing that height does not matter in basketball.

Teacher preparation programs, the fattest cash cows available to schools of education, where most educational research is done, get especially gentle treatment, along with certification demands that keep the programs well patronized.

Dartman 3 suggested that I was ignorant of flaws and dangers in testing, because I had dared say the best way to be sure children had learned was to test them. (Since he and I had collaborated on a national study, I think he knew full well that I understood testing.) I responded that some testing issues are intricate, and testing can distort if taken to extremes, but the basic competence the state is entitled to demand can be assessed relatively easily and accurately. I recited an example I had used in the Whisner case—you find out whether a child can read by asking him to read something aloud and then asking him to explain what it means.

Fortunately, it seems the court understood what Dartman 3 was obscuring—that some kinds of testing are far more problematic than others. I’ll mention only two that are pertinent here.

The most problematic testing, widely under attack as I write, involves high stakes for educators, whose reputations, often along with their salaries, placement, promotion or demotion, and even continuing employment, depend on how their students perform on tests. Typically, high-stakes testing is also quite complicated--by questionable connections between what is tested and what has been taught, between what is supposed to be taught and what is actually taught, and between what is taught or supposed to be taught and what most parents want for their children, for instance.

There is considerable evidence (including a dissertation by one of my UCLA advisees) that high-stakes testing can distort classroom instruction and inspire educators to cheat creatively. So Dartman 3 opposes high-stakes testing, and, under existing conditions in U.S. public education, I do also. Under reasonable conditions, however, high-stakes testing works well, as it did for many years in U. S. private schools using “College Board” examinations. (Ask me what conditions are reasonable, if you wish.)

In contrast to typical high-stakes testing, if parents and educators are held accountable by government only for seeing that children are prepared for good citizenship, and if it is not the business of government to specify any further how children’s futures are molded, the tests needed for verification can be limited, simple, and straightforward, posing no significant threat to good instruction, to educational diversity, to conscientious educators, or to the fundamental rights of parents. As I emphasized in testimony, that testing threatens liberty and decent instruction far less than do the regulations government bureaucrats love to impose on public and private schools and on home-schooling.

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