McNeil, Linda M. (2000) Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing. Reviewed by Clint Taylor, California State University, Los Angeles

McNeil, Linda M. (2000) Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing. New York: Routledge Pp. 304 $20 (Paper)       ISBN 0415920744 $75 (Cloth)       ISBN 0415920736 Reviewed by Clint Taylor California State University, Los Angeles October 5, 2000 "We've got to drop a bomb on them. We've got to nuke them. That's the way you change these organizations." —H. Ross Perot "This proficiency stuff isn't about us; it's about the administrators ...and I am not sure what else." —A Houston public school student             Linda McNeil's latest work from the Rice University Center for Education in Houston, Texas, tells the alarming story of how the academic quality of three of the city's magnet schools was compromised by reformers bent on imposing educational standards to achieve "greater accountability." Rice's Center For Education, McNeil explains, was formed to identify better means of supporting teachers who work in urban schools. Toward this end, McNeil studied three magnet schools within the city of Houston. Each was highly regarded for its ability to produce superior graduates.             The book documents, in compelling detail, how Texas politicians, led by the indomitable H. Ross Perot, and the quest for a panacea in the form of standardized instruction diminished the skills of Houston's ablest teachers and widened the racial achievement gap. McNeil focuses on an irony created by Perot himself. He, renowned for bullying bureaucrats and dismantling "bloated agencies," fortified the very state bureaucracy that he vowed to dismantle. She suggests that Perot, former Texas Governor Mark White, and other accountability enthusiasts would claim the state's new power and reach were the inadvertent consequences of bringing order to a system crying out for "quality control." McNeil suggests otherwise.             McNeil argues that in the name of accountability the control of Texas schools, including the three Houston magnet schools, shifted from public oversight of the education profession toward business-controlled management accountability systems. According to Ross Perot, leading a business was like leading a combat unit, there could only be one boss and his responsibility was to identify problems and fix them. Furthermore, if top "commanders" gave clear directions, they would be followed. Thomas Timar, in "Managing Educational Excellence: State Strategies to Reform Schools" (1988), notes that Perot's belief is the foundation of hierarchical policy implementation.             McNeil reminds us that because educational excellence lacks a single definition, policymakers like those in Texas are free to view issues and recurring dilemmas such as defining educational quality as mere technical problems in need of a fix. In fact, "Absent a complex understanding of schools, Perot's efforts strengthened the very bureaucrats he had hoped to undercut" (p. 184)             To Perot, the problem was control. For example, they thought they could improve the competency of teachers by circumventing the broken links of the Texas system for evaluating teachers: Perot was right about the quality of many of the bureaucratic layers of the Texas public schools. He was wrong about how they worked. Like his helicopter rescue of his employees held hostage in Iran ..., his "rescue" of the schools was predicated on an end-run, a dramatic circumvention of the villains holding teachers and children captive in administrative mediocrity. As a result of attempting an end-run, he left the basic structure intact. As a result of little curiosity about teaching and learning, he strengthened the bureaucracy as a controlling mechanism, rather than strengthening it as a support for teachers and students or weaken it altogether. (McNeil, p. 182)             Through McNeil's eyes, we see the system was not "nuked," it actually grew in size and power. The design of assessment instruments and the design of the consulting and training systems needed to inform administrators and teachers about the new accountability systems carried heavy costs. The contracts for student testing and the cost of aligning curricula with those new tests increased the power of the central bureaucracy over the school. She observes: "The educational costs of the collateral damage had been high, and they had been borne by teachers and students" (p. 228).             McNeil's investigations confirm that when the language of accountability dominates the talk among policymakers, children's scores on tests become the measure of teachers' and principals' performance. The indicators of true quality narrow to measurable data. McNeil points out "Any effects not captured by test scores are seen as 'anecdotes' rather than 'data' and are therefore dismissed as inconsequential" (p. xxvii). This insight is useful, but hardly a revelation. More important is her explanation of how standards and measures of student performance restratify education by race.             An interview with one of the creators of a new proficiency test to measure students' progress toward meeting new performance standards reveals the sinister effects of standardization on disadvantaged students. McNeil described the efforts of one of Houston's poorest and academically weakest African-American high schools to improve its weakest students' achievement by oversimplifying and compressing the curriculum to a test of deductive skills best measured by a multiple choice exam, a curriculum with little resemblance to the courses taught at the city's leading high schools: "It was a curriculum specifically designed to further stratify an already differentiated curriculum into a remedial content at the very lowest level which ... could appear to reduce student failures by giving 'these students' something to pass" (p. 200).             McNeil discovered that even at the strongest magnet schools in her study, teachers resorted to "defensive teaching." They simplified courses, reduced the variety of information sources, and throttled student interaction. These practices are reminiscent of Sizer's Horace's Compromise. McNeil highlights an excerpt from Sizer: Horace Smith compromised his efforts to open his students' minds and compromised between what he knew his students needed to learn and the effort he made to assure their success. The state's standardized reform would soon impose a teacher appraisal instrument to measure teacher's work. That instrument would try to enforce generic teaching behaviors splitting teachers' knowledge of their children from their teaching (Sizer, p. 143).             McNeil's investigations also produce a persuasive record of how schools, even those in extremely poor areas, work with their students to create success for them ...as long as the teachers are free to operate in a non-controlling, administrative structure. She notes: "The data emerging from these magnet schools would have made an important contribution to our understanding of the positive dynamics that can shape educational experiences under less controlling organizational environments if, in fact, the story had stopped with their precarious place in the structure of an urban district: supported by permission to be distinctive but not provisioned so as to act on that permission. As events developed, they became even more important as examples of the losses that can occur when curriculum and teaching are standardized." (p. 191)             McNeil punctures the myth that test-driven curricula raise the floor of student achievement. She found that Houston's magnet schools and many other classrooms throughout the system compromised higher academic quality by adopting a system to identify bad teachers, a system that forced teachers to divorce their subject knowledge from their classroom lessons: "The proficiency system threatened the quality of the curriculum by institutionalizing a consensus curriculum, by divorcing the knowledge of the teacher from the curriculum, by divorcing the knowledge and questions held by students from the required content, and by subjecting knowledge to a fragmentation filter that artificially altered its substance" (p. 205).             Ironically, McNeil uncovered little, if any, evidence that weak teachers improved when assessed by "objective" proficiency-based instruments. Since assessments of teaching ability left no room for complexity, weak teachers were gifted with a system under which they could perform satisfactorily.             Another trenchant observation of McNeil's may slow the current trend of "disaggregating data" about student performance. Her studies of Houston and the State of Texas at large, led her to the disturbing conclusion that disaggregation gives the appearance of bolstering the education of minority children but, in practice, magnifies inequalities because the drive to raise their scores leads to a focus on the test at the expense of more potent learning. Among Latinos, there is approximately a 10% high school graduation rate among adults in the United States (9 percent in Texas; 11 percent in California); among families in which high school graduation is a high goal, passing the TAAS [the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills] looms large. To get more Latinos to pass the 10th grade TAAS, some schools ... offer courses with no value other than TAAS prep. Others counsel students to leave school after ninth grade (or do not discourage those who might want to leave). The school's scores will be higher if these students exit before taking the 10th grade TAAS. (p. 250)             McNeil went on to observe: Sameness, absent massive investments at the under-resourced school, is achieved by 'leveling down' from the top, if at all.             The TAAS system of test-driven accountability masks the inequities that have for decades built unequal structures of schooling in this state [Texas]. Test-score inflation, through concentrated test-prep, gives the impression that teaching and learning are improving in minority schools when in fact teaching and learning may have been severely compromised by the attempt to raise scores. The investment in expensive systems of testing, test design, test contracts and sub-contracts, training of teachers and administrators to implement the tests, test security, realignment of curricula with tests, and the production of test-prep materials (Haney, Madaus, and Lyons, 1993), serves a political function in centralizing control over education and linking public education to private commerce." (p. 259)             McNeil argues that standardization, when used to induce "greater accountability" in a highly centralized system, perpetuates inequality by channeling money, time, and effort into the maintenance of measurement systems instead of relieving inequalities. Although the evidence is clear in Houston's magnet schools, one reservation about McNeil's findings should be raised. Because she focused only on magnet schools, one should be cautious about applying her results to other schools.             Magnet schools do not look or operate like conventional schools. Their students choose to attend and faculty members are volunteers. Without a wider study of conventional schools to document the effects of standardization on them, one cannot be certain that what occurred in Houston's magnet schools also occurred throughout the state of Texas. Nevertheless, McNeil concludes: ...the effects of the Texas Accountability System in de-skilling teachers, restratifying access to education and, in incipient ways, de-democratizing education, are not flaws in the system. They are the logical consequences of the system when it is working. It is the purpose of the accountability system to render education into a technical enterprise, one that is less owned by the public and less hampered by the inefficiencies of democratic debate. And one of its intended purposes may be to limit the education of the least powerful among our young people. We know that is a result; we hope it is an unintended consequence and not a deliberate one. (p. 270) References Anyon, Jean. (1997). Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform. New York & London: Teacher's College Press. Apple, Michael W. (1979). Ideology and Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Haney, W., Madaus, G.F. & Lyons, R. (1993). The Fractured Marketplace for Standardized Testing. Boston & London: Kluever Academic Publishers. Sizer, T. R. (1984). Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Timar, T. B. "Managing Educational Excellence: State Strategies to Reform Schools." In Timar & Kirp (1988). Managing Educational Excellence. London & New York: Taylor & Francis. About the Reviewer Clint Taylor is Associate Professor in the Division of Administration and Counseling at California State University, Los Angeles.