By requiring the use of multiple-choice, standardized testing for assessment purposes, the federal and state governments are intruding upon the prerogative of teachers to teach what they want in the manner they see fit. These requirements echo the attempts of Frederick Taylor and other practitioners of what Taylor called "scientific management" to control industrial workers around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Forcing teachers to address content that can be measured in standardized tests and to avoid more analytical material hinders learning. Doing so also devalues the profession of teaching in the same way that scientific management devalued the role of skilled craft workers in American factories.
Frederick W. Taylor was an efficiency expert: the first modern efficiency expert in world history. Around the turn of the Twentieth Century, he developed a set of ideas designed to get employees in manufacturing industries to produce more output. His term for this collection of strategies was scientific management, although they are sometimes referred to simply as Taylorism. In order to implement his ideas, Taylor contracted with companies to rearrange their production processes to simplify the tasks each employee performed. Instead of doing many different things, workers in Taylorized factories would execute the same simple tasks over and over. This not only increased production, but reduced an employer’s need for skilled labor. For this reason, employers could cut their overall wage bills.1
Taylor and his disciples cited the search for efficiency, “the one best way” to do a job, as justification for such changes. Because scientific management consultants claimed they understood the “natural laws” of human behavior and endurance, they argued that the implementation of scientific management would benefit both workers and society at-large. Nevertheless, skilled workers and their unions often vociferously protested these changes because Taylorism made their work monotonous and also trespassed upon what they perceived as their traditional prerogative to manage their own time on the job. Workers and their unions objected not only to the efforts of scientific managers to determine what workers did all day, but also to efforts to tell workers exactly how they should do it.2
Approaching the end of the Industrial Revolution, Taylor’s ideas provided a catalyst for increasing the output of American factories beyond the promise of technological advances alone. After Taylor’s death in 1914, scientific management spread throughout the world, and it has influenced everything from advice to housewives on how to do their chores to how Japanese (and later American) cars have been made. Taylorism has also shaped the structure of American education.
In 1962, the historian Raymond Callahan wrote the best-known account of how scientific management has affected American schools. Much of his book recounts the influence of Taylor’s ideas on educational administration -- everything from how to make better use of buildings and classroom space to how to standardize the work of janitors. Other aspects of scientific management in education treated students like workers. “The ability to add at a speed of 65 combinations per minute, with an accuracy of 94 percent,” wrote one reformer, “is as definite a specification as can be set up for any aspect of the work of the steel plant” (John Franklin Bobbitt quoted in Callahan, 1962: 81). Another line of reforms required teachers to document their teaching activities in order to minimize “waste.” However, since many of Taylor’s disciples in education were not educators themselves, they seldom tried to tell teachers what or how to teach. Scientific management in the modern classroom does not respect the idea that teachers know what to teach their students or how best to teach it.
The best example of Frederick Taylor’s ideas at work in education today are high-stakes standardized tests -- tests which have a significant effect on funding for schools and the careers of individual students. Although these exams can create enormous tension for students and administrators, it is teachers whose lives are most affected by them. Thanks to mounting pressure to get students to score high marks, teachers must concentrate on teaching the curriculum chosen by test-designers rather than local school boards or themselves. Furthermore, because preparation for multiple-choice or short answer questions that make up these tests require only a superficial understanding of complex material in order to answer them correctly, they provide no rationale for teachers to reinforce more complex concepts that take additional effort for students to understand. Since teachers do not need to teach or themselves understand abstract concepts that cannot be measured on standardized tests, creative pedagogy is not rewarded in this new regime and the quality of learning among students inevitably suffers. Like skilled workers in industrializing America, teachers’ prerogatives are disappearing and the talents that they once utilized daily are increasingly no longer called upon.
If a school’s life or death depends upon the results of standardized tests, it is only natural that a school would focus upon those subjects that will be on these tests and ignore those subjects that won’t. The most obvious manifestation of this is the phenomenon of “teaching to the test,” i.e. teaching students how to fill in the greatest number of correct bubbles, and precious little else -- regardless of whether such a skill is applicable to situations outside the testing environment. There is good reason to believe that this practice is now common in American classrooms. For example, consider Texas, a state that has pioneered the use of standardized testing in its education reform efforts. This is how four researchers from the RAND Corporation explain gains made by Texas students during the administration of Governor George W. Bush:
TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the state-mandated achievement test) questions are released after each administration. Although there is a new version of the exam each year, one version looks a lot like another in terms of the types of questions asked, terminology and graphics used, content areas covered, etc. Thus, giving students instruction and practice on how to answer the specific types of questions that appear on the TAAS could very well improve their scores on this exam (Klein, et. al, 2000).
In some cases Texas students are taught not to bother to read the passage on their reading questions, but to choose what looks right from the available answers (Lutton, 2001). Anybody who ever took a Princeton Review course to raise their SAT scores knows why understanding the mind of test creators improves results, but it certainly does nothing to improve a student’s practical knowledge.
In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush argued, “If you test a child on basic math and reading skills, and you’re teaching to the test, you’re teaching math and reading. And that’s the whole idea” (Bush, 2001). Assuming for the moment that this actually is the best way to teach these subjects (and this is a big assumption), is this the only feat that we want our schools to accomplish? In a recent survey conducted by the journal Education Week, “Close to half of the teachers report spending ‘a great deal’ of time preparing their students in test-taking skills” (Etheridge, 2001). This effort undermines the process of teaching topics, skills and concepts that cannot be measured easily, and, thus, won’t turn up on standardized tests. Under President Bush’s new education proposal, schools whose test scores do not improve must change their curriculum in order to boost student performance after only one year (Dewar, 2001). Schools in this position will be compelled to teach standardized test content to the detriment of other kinds of knowledge. In this way, the process of improving standardized tests can actually bring about a significant decline in actual, practical learning.
Jay Matthews writes a weekly on-line education column for the Washington Post. Skeptical about stories of standardized tests taking over curricula, he asked teachers to e-mail him so as to provide “a precise accounting of how the new state achievement tests affect teaching.” He got “scores” of responses from across the country. For example, “Raymond Larrabee was told his son’s eighth-grade honors English class would not have time to read all of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield because there were too many topics to cover for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test.” A teacher in Virginia wrote Matthews about being forced to abandon essays for submission to the National History day competition, an event designed to get students more involved with history, in part, by getting them to do their own research about the past (Matthews, 2001).3
Numerous such activities of inestimable value have fallen victim to test preparation mania because standardized tests simply cannot measure students’ critical thinking skills or engagement with their topic. Although some standardized tests include essay sections, since these exams are more expensive to grade than those with an all multiple choice format, these exams are likely to remain the exception to the rule. Even then, short essays on narrow topics do not necessarily stimulate the kind of higher-level thinking that teachers should aim to produce. Furthermore, as the New York Times has recently made clear, the people grading the written portions of standardized tests are under-qualified, overworked and under-paid (Henriques and Steinberg, 2001).
Opponents of standardized tests have practically screamed from the rooftops about the necessity of critical thinking as part of a quality education, but politicians do not seem to have heard. Both Democrats and Republicans support high-stakes testing. President Bush’s education bill, for example, recently passed the Senate by a vote of 91-8. It requires annual testing of students in reading and math from grades three through eight and once in high school. “What we passed today,” said Democrat Ted Kennedy, “is not a Democratic bill or a Republican bill - but an education bill” (Dewar, 2001).
What supporters of this measure and even most of its critics miss, however, is the debilitating effect of standardized testing on teachers. In the same way that teaching to the test requires less critical thinking by students, teachers need not engage in critical thinking in order to teach this material. In fact, teachers are actually being discouraged from thinking for themselves. As curricula standardize around high-stakes exams, teachers become, in essence, educational delivery systems rather than skilled professionals. Consider the example of Edison Schools, Inc., the largest private company running public schools in the United States. Edison likes to measure its performance through state standardized test scores. For this reason, their curricula are highly standardized (75% is determined by the company and 25% by local authorities). One Edison teacher told a reporter for Teacher Magazine that “independent-minded” teachers might not be cut out to work for Edison. “The program is too rigid,” she says.” This is one reason that a “very high percentage” of Edison teachers are at “the beginning stages of their careers” (Cookson, 2000). Another reason for the abundance of early-career Edison teachers is money. As a writer for the Dallas Observer explains, “(T)he company is renowned for hiring young teachers and teachers without professional degrees as a cost-cutting strategy” (Fox, 2000; also see Schrag, 2001: 22).
In an era of shrinking budgets, more and more public schools are behaving like private companies. This helps explain why so many teachers are unhappy. Teachers who remember the days before testing mania struck want to defend what they see as their prerogative to determine exactly what they do on the job. And like craftsmen who faced competition from unskilled machine tenders at the turn of the twentieth century, the deskilling of teachers expands the pool of possible teacher candidates, thereby allowing school districts to hold down wages. Districts can hire teachers who have minimal teaching qualifications because candidates need little training in order to teach to standardized tests.
Perhaps more important than dictating what teachers teach, standardized testing determines how teachers teach the material that is chosen for them. For example, with regard to the teaching of reading, evaluation by standardized tests tends to support teaching through phonics rather than the whole language method (i.e., sounds rather than the underlying concepts associated with the language) because the results of the whole language method do not test easily (Weaver, 2001). In 1996, California became the first state to mandate that reading be taught through phonics as a strategy to improve poor results on the state’s standardized test scores. Texas followed shortly thereafter. Of course, to say that the proper way to teach reading is a matter of controversy in the educational circles is a massive understatement. However, to permit politicians rather than educators to decide this matter is not only bad education policy, but it is an insult to teachers.
Another important methodological question raised by wholesale implementation of standardized testing comes from the field of history. Over the past forty years, teaching history at the college level has evolved from forcing students to memorize names and dates to using history as a tool to produce more complex results--such as getting students to better appreciate cultural diversity or to understand how historians use primary documents to reach conclusions about the past. Because multiple choice standardized tests are largely incapable of measuring complex goals, they inevitably depend upon knowledge of specific facts for the basis of their questions. Citing poor standardized test scores, critics have frequently decried the state of history teaching in America since students appear to be ignorant of what test designers deem to be basic factual knowledge (Wineburg, 2001: 192-93, viii). If this method of educational assessment entirely takes over the education system, teachers who are trying to promote critical thinking rather than rote memorization will have to turn their backs on their college training and teach facts in lieu of more critical analysis. Students will learn only dry, superficial facts and the kind of teaching which inspires dedicated teachers to enter the historical profession will fall by the wayside. My first task in teaching a college-level history course is to teach students that history is more than just a collection of facts. Those students who come to understand this tend to enjoy the subject much more than those who don’t. Bored students will become bored citizens with no understanding of where America has been and with no basis to judge where it is going in the future.
Although there are many reasons for teachers to be alienated, by telling them what to teach and how to teach it, standardized tests help make educational professionals bored too. Writing for EducationNews.Org, Carl O. Olson cites, “poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient instructional supplies, lack of clerical assistance and support staff, excessive and unnecessary paperwork, lack of planning time, disruptive students, lack of administrative and parental support, trivial in-service education (but), above all, a lack of professional autonomy” (Olson, 2001). Because standardized tests have such a great impact on curriculum decisions, they have become the greatest threat to teacher autonomy today. They may also be an important reason for teacher burnout. At a time when many districts are facing acute teacher shortages, shouldn’t we be trying to make teacher’s jobs less onerous and more meaningful? After all, it’s not like people go into teaching for the money.
One possible antidote to educational Taylorization is to educate parents and teachers about the effect standardized tests have on curricula. Oddly enough, the anti-testing movement is perhaps strongest among affluent suburban parents who lament the effect such tests have on their children’s nerves.4 Teachers’ organizations, on the other hand, have adopted a strategy of damage control. The National Education Association (NEA), for example, the largest teacher’s union in the country, opposes the use of standard tests to evaluate individual teacher performance, but its most recent resolution on the subject makes no mention of teacher autonomy. As former Brown University President Vartan Gregorian argues, “Teachers’ unions devote most of the energies to improving working conditions and pay for their members. But by and large they have failed to secure the professional prerogatives of teachers -- namely autonomy, flexibility and freedom to innovate” (Gregorian, 2001). Interestingly enough, in a March 2000 study of Edison Schools the company’s tiny percentage of teachers who belonged to unions were the ones most likely to complain about lack of independence (Cookson, 2000).
The failure to bring the dangers of standardized testing before the public is a terrible misstep by national teachers unions. If new teachers do not understand the freedoms that those in their profession once had, they cannot be expected to fight to get them back. Workers at the turn of the Twentieth Century understood the threat they faced from scientific management. Many struck spontaneously upon the introduction of scientific management into their workplaces because they objected in principle to others telling them how to do their jobs. Such workers often did this without the blessing of their national unions.5 Although the NEA likes to think of itself as being more of a professional organization than a union, it should recognize that Taylorism in the classroom undercuts the need for the very skills that teachers use to define themselves as professional -- knowledge of their subject matter and the ability to determine how best to teach students. For teachers, standardized tests are not a curriculum issue, they are a workplace issue like wages and benefits. If we ignore this issue, experienced teachers will continue to be replaced by inexperienced, less-skilled educational delivery systems.
As a professor at an institution of higher education, I am entitled to academic freedom. I am not only considering this term in its traditional political sense, i.e. the right to espouse unpopular ideas, but also in terms of my right to promote learning in the best way I see fit. Primary and secondary school teachers at all levels and at all stages of their careers deserve the same right—for their own good, as well as for the overall good of the American educational system. As Kenneth Bernstein, a ninth-grade social studies teacher from Maryland, wrote Jay Matthews: “I will not object to testing if you will allow me to get my kids ready the best way I can, and not also mandate the specific steps of instruction, for then I cannot teach the individual child” (Matthews, 2001). If teachers cannot choose methods and topics that engage both them and their students, education will suffer.
The reason for this is that contrary to the assumptions of standardized test advocates, education is not an ordinary commodity. It cannot accurately be measured in discreet units. Thus, it defies numerical measurement. Furthermore, there is no one best way to teach anything. Different content and different methods will work for different teachers in different settings. Destroying teacher prerogatives by introducing evaluation methods akin to scientific management will inevitably hurt production rather than help it along.
Aitken, Hugh G.J. Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Bush, George W. “Address of the President to the Joint Session of Congress,” C-Span Transcript, February 27, 2001, http://www.cspan.org/executive/stateofunion/sou01_trans.asp.
Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Cookson, Jr., Peter W. with Embree, Katie and Fahey, Scott. “The Edison Partnership Schools: An Assessment of Academic Climate and Classroom Culture,” A Report to the National Education Association, March 2000, http://www.nea.org/issues/corpmngt/cookrpt.html.
Dewar, Helen. “Senate Passes Major Revamp Of Education,” The Washington Post, June 15, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/education/A3404-2001Jun14.html.
Etheridge, Pat. “Survey reveals concerns about teaching to the test,” January 22, 2001, CNNfyi.com, http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/01/22/standardized.tests/.
Fox, Jonathan. “No Class,” The Dallas Observer, January 27, 2000, http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2000-01-27/feature.html/index_html?qs=1.
Gregorian, Vartan. “How to Train - and Retain - Teachers,” New York Times, July 6, 2001.
Henriques, Diana B. and Steinberg, Jacques. “Right Answer, Wrong Score: Test Flaws Take Toll,” New York Times, May 20, 2001.
Hill, David. “Punching Out,” Teacher Magazine, August 2000, http://www.edweek.org/tm/tmstory.cfm?slug=01Edison.h12.
Kanigel, Robert. The One Best Way: Frederick W. Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997).
Klein, Stephen P., Hamilton, Laura S., McCaffrey, Daniel F. and Stecher, Brian M. “What Do Test Scores in Texas Tell Us?,”Rand Corporation Issue Paper, 2000, http://www.rand.org/publications/IP/IP202/.
Lutton, Linda. “Testing, Testing: The Miseducation of George W. Bush,” In These Times, June 25, 2001, http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2515/lutton2515.html.
Matthews, Jay. “From Teachers to Drill Sergeants,” WashingtonPost.Com, June 12, 2001, http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/education/columns/classstruggles/A55385- 2001Jun12.html.
National Education Association, 2000-2001 Resolutions, B-56. Standardized Testing of Students, http://www.nea.org/resolutions/00/00b-56.html.
Olson, Carl O. “The Teacher Shortage is Changing the Profession,” EducationNews.Org, June 15, 2001, http://www.educationnews.org/teacher_shortage_is_changing_the.htm.
Robbins, Meg. “The Failure of Testing,” Salon, May 11, 2001, http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/05/11/test_revolt
Schrag, Peter. “Edison’s Red Ink Schoolhouse,” The Nation 272, June 25, 2001, p. 22.
Weaver, Connie. “Creating Support for Effective Literacy Education,” Heinemann, Forthcoming, http://www.ncte.org/wlu/08894f7.htm.
Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001),
1. Another one of Taylor’s ideas was offering incentive pay to workers who worked harder to produce more. There are parallels between this and other aspects of modern educational reform.
2. The best book on Taylor is The One Best Way: Frederick W. Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel, (New York: Viking, 1997).
3. For more on National History day, see its web site at: http://www.thehistorynet.com/NationalHistoryDay/. As a District Coordinator for this years event, I can attest first hand that participation in it has been sacrificed for more standardized test preparation in Colorado schools too.
4. See Meg Robbins, “The Failure of Testing,” Salon, May 11, 2001 (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/05/11/test_revolt) for a summary of recent actions by parents in opposition to standardized tests.
5. The most famous example of this was a strike by machinists at the U.S. Government’s Watertown, Massachusetts, weapons arsenal in 1911. See Hugh G.J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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