A Brief Commentary on Proficiency Testing

Proficiency tests are entirely misleading with regard to intelligence. All they measure is dominant ruling class cultural values and facts. It is an outrage that we ignore research that shows the only thing proficiency tests scores correlate with is social-economic class, nothing else. They are tests of cultural experience only.

It is a total illusion that one school is better than another because of higher test scores. For example, there is a remarkably good group of teachers in Youngstown City Schools, yet the tests scores are low compared to other districts such as Canfield or Austintown. The point is that, almost without exception, a school's tests scores have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of its teachers. If we could switch the hardworking teachers of Canfield and Youngstown City, there would most probably be no change in the students' test scores in either district over any length of time.

Proficiency testing is product of ideologically conservative special interest groups and right-wing politicians such as those who dominate the Ohio Legislature and Governor's office. Proficiency tests further disadvantage the disadvantaged. They become phony quality measures of teachers, schools, and school districts. As such, they become the club of choice to bash public schools in general and teachers in particular.

The public, for the most part, believes in the legitimacy of these tests. They have been told by the politicians, media, and others that they are valid. Rarely, if ever, is an opposing viewpoint presented. The Cincinnati Enquirer's study is the first serious piece of public research to appear in print in a large metropolitan area. However, the text that explains the data still retreats to right-wing special interest sound-bites to more or less explain the results away.

Those of us who are adamantly opposed to this type of testing are not apologists for poor academic performance. On the contrary, reform of schooling requires reconceptualizing what schools do and how they do it. When we can get a consensus that schools should empower learners with meaning for the knowledge they study, we can address intelligently the topic of academic achievement. However, schooling and teaching for empowerment is a threat to those who hold economic and political power. We know how to teach for empowerment, the power holders are not interested in our doing it.

We also know that there has never been a better judge of academic ability than the classroom teacher. The move to the imposition of proficiency tests has further displaced the classroom teachers as they are more and more marginalized from the central decision making role in teaching. I will always argue that, if left to their own professional judgment, the vast majority of classroom teachers will benefit our children a thousand times more that all of the politicians, bureaucrats, and CEOs put together. The ultimate test of anything that is claimed as benefiting America's public school students is simply asking what values motivate the group or person behind the claim. With the classroom teacher, the values that motivate are far less suspect than those distant from the classroom.

The battle against proficiency testing will never start unless the major teacher unions, NEA and AFT, are recaptured by the working teachers they once claimed to represent. The elitist executive committees act only on their own self-interest, rarely do they act in the interests of the classroom teachers. They hold such mistrust and contempt for the teacher that they will not even permit direct election of state or national union officers.

The case against proficiency tests is not difficult to make. The substance of it is within the Enquirer study. The case against standardized testing in general is emerging primarily through the efforts of FairTest. But making the case against such testing is only one small part of making a larger case against those economic and political power brokers who are striving to destroy the American system of public schooling: CEOs, Chambers of Commerce, the religious right, boards of regents, state departments of education, teacher unions, and, last but not least, many of our elected representatives both Republican and Democrat .