Collateral Damage:
How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools
Sharon Nichols and David C. Berliner
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2007
Page after page, chapter after chapter, the authors methodically and meticulously cite overwhelming research and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that high-stakes testing has created a perfect storm that is mindlessly smashing students, teachers, administrators, schools, and the teaching profession on the rocks of its relentless system of rewards and punishments. The havoc is both predictable and unavoidable, they write, referencing Campbell’s Law, a principle from the social sciences: "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 was intended to monitor." After introducing the principle in the first chapter, the authors scrupulously document exactly such corruption not only in the testing process, but more insidiously in the teaching and learning process No Child Left Behind claims to want to improve.
No doubt many well-intentioned educators believe that even if high stakes testing has some negative outcomes, the overall good it produces outweighs them. The book makes a compelling argument against this stance by providing a clear and detailed examination of the various types of corruption that are already evident. While arguments against the testing can be made on an array of moral grounds, as the authors do point out, all moral reasoning is supported as well by empirical evidence that the tests simply do not, and cannot, do what they intend. Meanwhile, the damage imposed is critical: countless students, teachers and administrators alike have resorted to cheating—deplorable but understandable in a situation they perceive as both threatening to their futures and unfair. Poor students, students whose English is weak or non-existent, and students with special needs are all disadvantaged in a variety of ways, including being pushed out of schools because they are "score suppressors." Resources are diverted from the neediest students to those known as "bubble kids"—those whose scores are borderline and who may pass the tests with intensive coaching. States, too, have resorted to a kind of cheating by learning to manipulate data to give a false impression of their schools’ performance; these maneuvers include misreporting dropout rates and setting passing scores so low as to be meaningless as indicators of student learning. In many schools, the test has become the curriculum, so that what a test score indicates is merely how well students have learned to take a particular state test. Because test content— primarily low-level, easy to score questions—becomes classroom content, test scores do not and cannot reflect how well students have actually mastered complex state standards for learning. Of course, teaching no longer focuses on complex thinking, either, since students will not be tested on or rewarded for that, and subjects other than those tested have been vanishing from classrooms. The emotional and practical outcome of these corruptions is low morale among students and educators alike, who are all leaving educational systems in record numbers.
While the research cited is impressive, perhaps even more persuasive is the anecdotal evidence the authors present to put a human face and voice on the numbers they report. Among the many offered are these:
One year an eighth-grade math teacher working with motivated and interested students who scored well on their tests was asked to lead teaching workshops for colleagues to share his techniques. The next year, when despite his heroic efforts with special needs students and students whose first language was not English, his students scored poorly, he was made to attend the same workshops he had taught he year before to improve his teaching. "How can we recognize good teaching and work to improve it in an atmosphere of such confusion?" (p.22)
"Martin B., the 16-year-old son of a friend, came home from high school one day and asked his mother if he should quit school. Mrs. B., of course, asked what prompted this concern. Martin explained that in his English course the teacher said to the students, ‘Why are you still here? Don’t you know that no matter how well you do here you will all fail the AIMS test’ [Arizona’s diploma requirement] . . . . He told the students they should quit and get jobs, since they would never get a degree anyway, they might as well go out and make some money." (p. 62)
An elementary principal found when she opened her test materials that included with the tests and answer sheets were latex gloves and a large zip-lock bag. "Her instructions directed her, on test day, to put on the latex goves and insert the test booklets that children had vomited on into the zip-lock bag, and to return those tests along with others to the Department of Education. So the good people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts fully understand that these tests are stressful to children, and they expect a goodly number of children to throw up as a function of their assessment program." (p. 144) [Reviewer’s note: The same supplies and instructions have been distributed in Pennsylvania.]
Some of the book’s examples move beyond the stupidities of assessing teachers by student test scores and the unconscionable damage done to children. They demonstrate in fact that, in more ways than one, the tests have become literally life and death matters. One principal faced with yet another test of her largely immigrant students, on the test morning "locked her office door and shot herself in the head." (p. 138) And, when one gifted middle-school student with a severe asthmatic condition asked the teacher to phone a parent hovering near the school in case of an emergency the morning after he’d had a serious attack, the teacher responded "‘Oh, K, can’t you wait a little longer and finish the test? I’ll call your parents as soon as you’re done.’ . . . The teacher and school got what it wanted, a high score on the high-stakes achievement test, while literally putting the life of a child at risk." (p. 144)
That this child was author David Berliner’s grandson makes the formidably calm marshalling of evidence in this book all the more remarkable. The subject matter here cries out, over and over again, for intellectual as well as moral outrage. Anyone who wants to genuinely understand the consequences of high-stakes testing—and the good alternatives to it that exist—must read this text.
See also: Susan Ohanian's extended review of Collateral Damage.
Suggested readings:
Jones, G., Jones, B. & Hargrove, T. (2003). The unintended consequences of high-stakes testing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Neil, Monty, Guisbond, L., & Shaeffer, B. with Madden, J. and Legeros, L. (2004) Failing our children. Cambridge, MA: FairTest.
Rothstein, R. (2004, February). Testing our patience
. The American Prospect, 15(2), 45+.