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The 11th Bracey Report on The Condition of Public Education

2001; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/003172170108300212

1940-6487

Gerald W. Bracey,

Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy

Mr. Bracey takes a close look at our national mania for testing, at new NAEP data, at international comparisons - and, alarming, at where it could all end up. A LOT of people think I defend schools reflexively. Not so. But a little more than a decade ago, I found a lot of data that proved that the people who make up what I have come to call the Education Scare Industry were wrong, and I said so. When I have thought the schools have been wrong, I have said that, too. I begin this report with three of the most despicable, totalitarian acts by school authorities known to me in the 34 postdoctoral years I've been in education. These are the attacks by Gwinnett County, Georgia, on Susan Ohanian; by the Massachusetts Department of Education on Alfie Kohn; and by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on George Schmidt. I presume Ohanian and Kohn are known to Kappan readers from their bylines in this journal. Schmidt was a teacher in Chicago. All three of their stories are dirty - but informative - tales about deeds done in the name of high-stakes testing. The beginning of the Schmidt and Ohanian stories were recounted in the 10th Bracey Report. They continue here. In addition to being a longtime teacher of English and journalism, Schmidt also publishes a muckraking (not a pejorative term in my lexicon) monthly newspaper called Substance. One day, a plain brown envelope delivered to the Substance offices was found to contain copies of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations). Schmidt thought the test items were awful and, rather than write an editorial to that effect, published them in his paper. CPS suspended him without pay and sued for $1.4 million, which it claimed would be necessary to write new tests. CPS subsequently fired him. When I saw the tests, I tried to imagine what would have happened had I produced them back in the days when I was director of testing for the Virginia Department of Education. Someone would have leaked the tests to the Richmond-Times Dispatch. The Dispatch would have published the worst questions, along with a scathing editorial mocking the state department's incompetence. The department would have summarily sacked me and deservedly so. This is what should have taken place in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune should have picked the tests up from Schmidt, published the worst items, and written a scathing editorial. Then CPS should have fired Carole Perlman, director of testing. Instead, the Tribune backed the tests and demanded that Schmidt be fired. Perlman testified against Schmidt at his hearing. These tests were more than just a set of trivial pursuit items, although most of the items were that, too. The tests contained items that had no right answer, items that had multiple right answers, and items to which the official right answer was wrong. It also contained items for which an earlier item cued the answer for a later one. In short, these tests were garbage. At a hearing on the issue (at which I testified in support of Schmidt), Perlman had the effrontery to defend the tests and even cajoled Tom Kerins, former Illinois director of testing, to testify on behalf of the tests and to confirm the cost estimate to replace them. Shame on you, Tom. The $1.4 million, by the way, works out to about $12,000 an item. Chicago schoolteachers, not professional item writers, wrote the questions. At $12,000 per question, every four items cost the equivalent of a Chicago teacher's annual salary. How could they possibly cost so much? Well, it is true that CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing) liberated $500,000 from CPS, but it claimed to have provided only a little technical assistance in teaching teachers how to write items. How CRESST could charge so much money for so little work could also spark an investigation. The CPS suit is ongoing, as is Schmidt's countersuit involving First Amendment arguments. Some educators in Western Massachusetts invited Alfie Kohn to be the keynote speaker at a conference. …