"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.'' — Henry Peter Brougham.
In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, relatively inexpensive desktop computers were growing from toys for word processing and playing games to serious computational engines, capable of performing scientifically important calculations. At that time raw computing speed was the crucial competitive measure. Everyone wanted the fastest computer.
The problem was how to measure what fastest meant. Was it how fast the computer performed "integer'' calculations — for example multiplying 10 times 3? Was it how fast the computer made "floating-point'' computations, for example multiplying 6783.468 times 1070.03? Was it how fast information could be retrieved from a hard disk?
Of course, the answer depended upon what job you were asking the computer to perform. To make comparisons easier, suites of tests were developed to provide a total speed assessment. Computer manufacturers are smart people. They tried to ace these tests. They tuned their computers in ways that improved performance on the suite of tests, but did not significantly improve computer performance in day-to-day use.
There is an analogous concern about proposed national educational performance tests. It is possible that teachers will learn to "teach to the test'' in such a way as to just improve performance solely on the national tests.
This, however, is precisely the point. If tests are well designed, "teaching to the test'' may be the same insuring that children are learning the right skills and acquiring the right knowledge. When certain computer speed tests were "broken'' by tuning the computers to the test, slight adjustments in the suite of tests brought relative comparisons between computers back into line. Moreover, people relatively quickly learned that small differences in computer speed are not noticeable in actual operation. There need to be significant differences before such differences are important.
Wit has it that national educational performance tests are doomed to political failure. Conservatives do not like anything with the word "national'' in it and Liberals fear the idea of "tests.''
Conservatives worry that the fad-following touchy-feelly educational establishment, whose U.S. History curriculum smacked of left-wing historical revisionism, might do the same for any new national tests. This is a realistic concern. Nonetheless there is a successful model to work from.
Currently, the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) run by the National Assessment Governing Board regularly provides reliable data on national educational performance. These tests are given to students from scientifically selected samples and have been positively regarded by both ends of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, it is only possible to compare states with other states. Since small representative samples are used, there are not enough data to allow district-by-district or school-by-school comparisons. Parents of individual students cannot see how well their children fared. If the NAEP tests were broadly applied, they could provide information necessary for school accountability.
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