Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardied Testing [Hardcover]

Richard P. Phelps (Author), J. E. Stone (Preface), Herbert J. Walberg (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0765801787 | ISBN-13: 978-0765801784 | Publication Date: July 1, 2003

Kill the Messenger is perhaps the most thorough and authoritative work in defense of educational testing ever written. Phelps points out that much research conducted by education insiders on the topic is based on ideological preference or profound self-interest. It is not surprising that they arrive at emphatically anti-testing conclusions. Much, if not most, of this hostile research is passed on to the public by journalists as if it were neutral, objective, and independent. This volume explains and refutes many of the common criticisms of testing; describes testing opponents strategies, through case studies of Texas and the SAT; illustrates the profound media bias against testing; acknowledges testings limitations, and suggests how it can be improved; and finally, outlines the consequences of losing the war on standardied testing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a thoroughly researched and highly readable book." -- Pat Naughtin, in The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

"If you're interested in how standardized testing affects education ...you ought to read [it]." -- Linda Seebach, Rocky Mountain News, January 24, 2004

"Reviews the debate over standardized testing requirements and argues in favor of testing." -- Selected for YBP, Inc. and Academia Magazine's CORE 1000 recommended books for academic libraries, Fall 2003

"The best documented and most readable classification and refutation of test-bashing myths I know of." -- Nicholas Stix, A Different Drummer, October 28, 2003

"as much about censorship and professional arrogance as testing [from] scholars and journalists who deliberately distort and ignore facts." -- Charlene K. Haar, author of The Politics of the PTA and president of The Education Policy Institute

"clearly draws the battle lines over required standardized testing, acknowledges its limitations, defends testing over alternatives and chides media bias" -- Book News, Inc. (c)2003

Essential reading for everyone with an interest in education. Standardized tests may not be perfect, but they’re all we’ve got. -- Campaign for Real Education Newsletter, No.51, Winter 2003

Improving education is hard. It's easier to attack tests. Phelps explains and defends testing [against] ideologically motivated scholars, gullible journalists. -- Joanne Jacobs, joannejacobs.com

Incensed by the partisan tactics of anti-testing groups, Phelps deliberately [employs] scrupulous documentation and a robustly empirical approach. -- Martin Turner, Intelligence, v.32, 2004.

reminds us that testing [provides] information [and] it is often easier to kill the messenger than fix the underlying problem[s] -- Steve Driesler, Executive Director, Assn of American Publishers - School Division

From the Inside Flap

In response to public demand, new federal legislation now requires testing of most U.S. students, in grades three through eight, in reading and mathematics. In much of the country, this order will promote an increase in the amount of standardized testing. Many educators, parents, and policymakers who have paid little attention to testing policy issues in the past will now be forced to do so. They deserve better information on the topic than has generally been available in the past. Kill the Messenger is intended to fill this gap.

Kill the Messenger is perhaps the most thorough and authoritative work in defense of educational testing ever written. Phelps points out that much research conducted by education insiders on the topic is based on ideological preference or profound self-interest. It is not surprising that they arrive at emphatically anti-testing conclusions. He notes that "external" and "high stakes" testing in particular attracts a cornucopia of invective. This hostile research is passed on to the public by journalists as if it were neutral, objective, and independent.

Kill the Messenger describes the current debate, the players, their interests, and their positions. It explains and refutes many of the common criticisms of testing. It describes testing opponents’ strategies, through case studies of Texas and the SAT. It illustrates the profound media bias against testing. It acknowledges testing’s limitations, and suggests how testing can be improved. It defends testing by comparing it with its alternatives. Finally, the book concludes by outlining the consequences for America of losing the "war on standardized testing."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 331 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765801787
• ISBN-13: 978-0765801784
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,528,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Value and Importance of Standardized Testing., October 19, 2003

By 

Erich H. Martel (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardied Testing (Hardcover)

"Kill the Messenger" by Richard Phelps is an effective and extensively documented defense of standardized testing and the flawed and fabricated arguments of its opponents.
As a teacher of Advanced Placement U.S. History, I "teach to the test," a national test that over 100,000 students take each May. Colleges, the military and many employers find applicants' standardized test results useful, because they can usefully predict future success.
Does anyone think that a college admissions committee can find no useful, predictive value between one student's SAT math score of 420 and and another's 620 out of a possible 800? In the real world of high schools, within one school system and even within one school building, the same year-long performance by one student might receive a grade of D or F with one teacher, while another might assign it a grade of A or B. This is the reality of American education that parents, students and teachers across the country know all too well.

By employing a common set of uniform measures, standardized tests allow a college admissions committee to see which sets of grades appear to be more reliable.

Phelps shows the contradictions in the arguments of testing opponents: "Most of us would argue that it is not fair to make high-stakes judgments of students based on the mastery of material to which they have not been exposed. Most testing opponents concur. They criticize vociferously when high stakes tests cover subject matter that students have not had an opportunity to learn. Then, sometimes in the same argument or speech, testing opponents will criticize just as vociferously the process of teaching material thatis covered on a test - that is wrong, too, that is 'teaching to the test.'"

Since public education is supported by tax dollars, the public has a right to know how its schools are performing. Standardized tests document the abject failure of many school systems to educate large numbers of students and simultaneously attest to real success, wherever it appears.

Phelps targets other evocative but baseless accusations against testing, including: "testing distorts instruction" (sad to say, the force of standardized tests often leads to the first effective teaching in a class or school!), "ignores each student's individuality," "penalizes the use of innovative curricula and teaching strategies" (could it be that these strategies, such as wasting huge amounts of instructional time on group projects and group activities, may prevent students from learning the material they are expected to know?), "unfair to women and minorities" (In reality, standardized tests reveal that many school systems are so dysfunctional that they fail to provide adequate instruction for minorities.), etc.

In a chapter that should interest all parents, Phelps examines the misleading criticisms of "The Big, Bad SAT," which almost two-thirds of U.S. colleges include in the mix of criteria for making admissions decisions. Colleges use the SAT [and AP scores] or the ACT because they are reliably predictive of a student's academic performance during his or her first year in college, which is when most drop-outs occur. Since grade inflation in many high schools masks lackluster performance and achievement, colleges need a more objective standard - and parents should be thankful that one exists. The SAT or ACT creates a common national measure that "college admissions counselors rate ... as a more reliable measure than .. high school grade point average, extracurricular activities, recommendations, essays and so on." If SAT tests had no future performance validity, colleges would not require them.

Phelps also looks at test preparation companies' claims that they they can raise SAT test scores and cites studies that show limited gains from "test coaching" - far short of the exaggerated claims. He cites one 1998 study of the recentered SAT I that found an "average effect (increase) from 21 to 34 points on the combined SAT I score scale" of coached students over those who received no coaching.

In other chapters, Phelps explains the testing systems and how and why other countries use standardized tests, looking specifically at the "testing systems of the 29 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), essentially the wealthier countries of the world, plus China, Russia and Singapore," the countries with whom US students are most frequently compared in media reports of international test results.

Phelps also examines the debates over testing in Texas and the tendency of the media to give more space to opponents of testing, while rarely subjecting their claims to critical examination.

In exposing the illogic of the arguments of testing opponents and the flawed use of evidence they cite, Phelps' work enables readers to understand some of the obstacles to improving student achievement. The next time one hears criticism of standardized testing by Alfie Kohn, FairTest, Gerald Bracey, Howard Gardner and many others, a quick check in "Kill the Messenger" might find that Richard Phelps has already examined and dissected it.

Phelps' readable prose makes this often mystifying component of modern education understandable to all of us who need to understand it: parents, teachers, school board members and interested members of the public whose taxes pay for our public schools.

18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The General Patton of the Testing Wars, March 23, 2004

By 

Nicholas Stix (New York City/Queens) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardied Testing (Hardcover)

A week doesn't go by, without a mainstream media story on the "horrors" of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.

The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that journalists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth spread by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.

For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers' unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book.

As Phelps tells it, Kill the Messenger "is as much about censorship and professional arrogance as it is about testing." The author contends that the teachers and administrators who control the public education monopoly, and the teacher education professors who monopolize teacher credentialing, oppose standardized testing in order to shield themselves from public scrutiny and accountability. "... it is disturbing, because school administrators and education professors represent a group of public servants who should serve as models to our children. We pay them high salaries and give them very secure jobs. Then, we give them our children. Is just a little bit of external, objective evaluation of what they do with our money and our children really asking so much?"

Influential test-bashers include Walter Haney, Linda McNeil of Rice University, Harvard's Howard Gardner, University of California president Richard Atkinson, writers Alfie Kohn and Nicholas Lemann, and the organizations Fair Test, UCLA's CRESST (National Center for Research on Evaluations, Standards, and Student Testing), and Boston College's CSTEEP (Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy).

Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children's academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. "Objective" is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. "External" means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. "Standardized" means that a test "is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way." And "high stakes" means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and "portfolios" of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.

Phelps sets out test-bashers' strategies and tactics; presents case studies of campaigns against the SAT, the Texas teachers' literacy test, and the 2000 October Surprise attack on the "Texas Miracle" of educational progress under then-Gov. George W. Bush; media coverage; the "benefits of testing"; legitimate concerns about testing; and "alternatives to standardized testing." Two appended glossaries translate test-bashers' Orwellian jargon, and explain testing terms.

Richard Phelps drives through the armies of test-bashers like Patton's Third Army cutting through France in the summer of '44, cataloguing and refuting the misrepresentations they have spread.

For instance, test-bashers have for years insisted that American students are tested more than students in any other country, and that high-stakes, standardized testing causes dropout rates to increase, and educators to "teach to the test." And liberal reporters eat this stuff up!

Phelps scolds the test-bashers for being too lazy to make a couple of calls abroad, to determine that their assumption is false. "Virtually every other industrialized country in the world tests its students more, and with greater consequences riding on the results, than we do." He shows how education professor Walter Haney inflates dropout figures by stealthily employing a highly irregular definition, whereby he counts anyone who fails to graduate on time with his age group as a "dropout," and then leaps to the baseless conclusion that the fictional dropouts were caused by standardized testing. Noting that it would be irresponsible not to teach to the test, Phelps responds to that charge, "So, they should instead teach material that the test will not cover? They should `teach away from the test'?"

Kill the Messenger could have been called "Coloring Education News," since it does for education reporting what William McGowan's Coloring the News did for journalism in general. Phelps' analyses of media bias, including statistical breakdowns showing how the media let test-bashers dominate the testing debate, provide a model for media criticism. He also reports on the undisguised hostility some reporters and producers show scholars who fail to tow the party line. (Full disclosure: Phelps praises my education reporting.)

Phelps suggests that the most insidious test-bashers of all, are those who claim to support testing - just not any existing test. "Given all the variety and all the experience, anyone who cannot be satisfied by any current testing program can never be satisfied with any testing program."

Ultimately, Phelps writes, "Most of the attacks on student testing, indeed, are attacks on measurement - of any kind - or, more specifically, any measurement made by groups `external' to the group being measured." Phelps cautions the reader, however, that any test is only as good as the curriculum and instructional theory it is tied to.

Written largely in a conversational style, notwithstanding its staggering scholarship, Kill the Messenger casts much needed light on a public policy issue that affects us all, but which those holding the public's trust have kept shrouded in darkness. As Phelps argues, "the debate on testing ... is part of a war for the control of our country's schools ... The booty is our children's futures. The stakes are enormous."

Men's News Daily, March 10, 2004.

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Evidence, December 7, 2003

By 

Terry Amerine (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardied Testing (Hardcover)

"Kill the Messenger" presents a compelling case in favor of standardized testing. The evidence presented by Phelps is stunning. His treatment of the subject is quite thorough. We do not allow other industries to dictate their own performance measurements. Why do we allow it in education? And as we continue to trust our educators, our children are lagging sadly behind those in other countries. Obviously our current approach to education is not working and yet we allow our educators to sing the same song and dance the same dance.