Customer Reviews

Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools

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Berliner and Nichols take on high-stakes testing at a critical time in this book. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is currently up for renewal and revision, and the broad, bipartisan coalition that passed the initial legislation must decide whether to strengthen the law, modify the law, or radically dismantle it. Berliner and Nichols argue against high-stakes testing due to the corruptive influence of high-stakes tests on educators, students, and parents. Much of their evidence is taken from extensive research in the newspapers along with some analysis of the types of programs and results achieved in states thus far.

A great deal of their analysis rests on applying Campbell's Law to the arena of high stakes test. Campbell's Law states that any time a sociological measure is attached to high stakes consequences, the efforts of people to avoid the high stakes consequences will corrupt the effectiveness of the indicator. Anyone familiar with NCLB will have heard complaints about how the law drives educators to teach to the test; this work goes into far greater detail and systematically analyzes how high-stakes tests are not merely stressful, they invalidate what they are trying to measure. There are many powerful stories in this books of diplomas denied, educators demoralized, and children injured by high-stakes tests. Anyone who has been hurt by NCLB will gather food from this work.

Unfortunately, this book will not sway the politicians who are committed to NCLB very much. Opponents will attempt to muster their own stories of how schools were motivated to get their act together when they had to fear the consequences of the law. At times, Berliner and Nichols accuse their opponents of more sinister motives and do not give them too many olive branches that might lead present supporters of the NCLB and the progressive opposition to break bread and agree that they all want to help children. Partisan politics is the order of the day I suppose, and I feel that truly great books of politics work to transcend those partisan politics and build foundations for effective collaboration.

Still, I found this book a helpful statement of opposition to NCLB that crystallizes many of the frustrations I've encountered when I've tutored SAT. You see families pouring money into the exams and educators manipulating data and you know that you're measuring how well people play the game as well as how much they know of the tested content.

This is a passionate book that will be helpful for educators frustrated by NCLB looking for energy and motivation to organize and strengthen their analysis of the failings of the law.

3.5 stars

--SD

Many years ago an educator from Britain and I were discussing the direction that public education in America was taking. The signs of the "accountability" movement were becoming evident even then. After a while, my visitor remarked, "What a shame. In England, we don't just test, we teach." That judgment is more true today than ever in the history of American education. What a shame! We have created these tests, and now testing has supplanted teaching in our schools...unless of course you count "teaching the test" as actually teaching, which I do not.
Nichols and Berliner have sounded the wake-up call. Who will listen?

The authors of this text make a very pointed and specific argument: that attaching high-stakes to test scores corrupts and invalidates the measure. The extent of cheating and malfeasance is found at the student, teacher, district, and state levels because of the enormous pressure put on all parties to raise standards according to the required standardized testing mandated by 2001's No Child Left Behind Act.

Nichols and Berliner describe an environment where schools have taken the power out of the teacher's hands to determine what should be taught. Instead, state standardized testing with high stakes (which is to say funding, employment status for teachers, graduation status for students, and school operability are at stake if certain benchmarks are not met) create an impetus for school administrators to narrow the curriculum to focus the school's energy on that which is being tested. Because there are such high stakes attached almost exclusively to the test results of the students, the authors argue that Campbell's law comes into play: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Their body of evidence includes news articles from across the country detailing a number of examples of such corruption, as well as interviews with educators who have witnessed the educational environment change firsthand. The examples can become repetitive, but that may be reason enough to be concerned about the unintended consequences of high-stakes accountability in education.

Perhaps most importantly, the authors do not suggest that accountability should be removed from the classroom. Instead, they insist that a more holistic approach should be taken with lower stakes applied to just test scores. It is an accessible read and very timely as this bill faces renewal. Recommended for parents and educators alike.

This is perhaps the most important book to date on the perverse effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its mandates for high-stakes testing. The authors provide irrefutable evidence of the problems of a school accountability system which relies on a single indicator--test scores. They explain how when a single social indicator is used to measure something, it corrupts the very thing it is attempting to measure. The authors provide example after example of how the pressure to raise test scores has led to questionable ethical behavior which is harmful to students, schools, and our nation as a whole.

Despite the depressing content, the authors write in a highly accessible and entertaining style, and even manage to interject a bit of humor to lighten the heavy burden which comes when one comtemplates the implications of their findings.

It is a must read for all educators, parents, and policy makers. Indeed, I hope the latter will read this book and make changes the authors suggest for a more reasonable acountability system.

This book is a must reed for every parent living in one of the 26 states that require an exit exam for graduation from high school.

Parents, teachers, principals, school board members and members of congress who vote for educational practices should be required to read this book before they impose these conditions on young children. This book is a must read.

Something can be valid but at the same time irrelevant. The arguments presented here are based on research that I am not competent to refute. Let's stipulate that the findings are accurate. No doubt it is true and indeed would have to be true that the test results are skewed by issues of stress and fear. This is true at the Olympics and every other arena of competition. I can't see what the point is. No doubt schools and the individuals in them will feel pressure, just as a school orchestra must feel when invited to play at the state competition. Not auditioning is the only way to ensure one a peaceful state of mind. The anxieties students feel are built into educational competition. Anyone who tutors or teaches SAT-type exam preparation knows that the kids feel pressure. Of course, without it they wouldn't study. There's the rub. We had an educational system lacking standards and without accountability for years; that's what created the groundswell of support for this legislation. Nothing was going on out there. Gym teachers were teaching chemistry; history teachers doubled as baseball coaches who freelanced in the counseling office during their prep periods. The suggestion that something valuable and delicate is being destroyed by this test mania is true, but that refinement was killed long before NCLB came along. Teachers cry out, "Why won't they just let us teach!" My colleague used to teach the Vietnam War all year long instead of chronology of American history simply because he loved the subject and had a Vietnamese wife. He showed "Apocalypse Now" 15-20 during the school year to the same kids. Now administrators can't allow that sort of thing and don't. I had another friend who spent all day Monday telling her students about her weekend dates and asked them to vote on which man seemed most eligible. Time was being wasted, incompetent teachers were in the classrooms without credentials or knowledge and frequently with neither. This hasn't disappeared as a problem, but it is less blatant. NCLB is not just testing. One of its key components is requiring teachers to be qualified to teach the subject(s)to which they have been assigned. Such positions had for years been assigned on the basis of favoritism. Currying favor and staying on the "good side" of principals has been the code of the classroom samurai for decades. Positions were assigned as favors and rewards (and still are, I'm sure). NCLB has brought for the first time a measure of "maturity" and professionalism back to the schools. It has shaken things up and lent an air of improvement to the entire enterprise known here as "public education." All of this is due more to fear of losing funding than to the merits of the tests themselves, which are indeed rather awful. I believe the authors' argument that such testing to harmful is probably true, but the harm of not testing is even greater. For the first time in a very long time kids are being asked to learn something unrelated to the tastes and prejudices of their individual teachers. It is called knowledge.