by Deborah Meier

It’s about time someone wrote this book. Probably a lot of what Angela Engel sets forth here has been said before—but never has it been said better, and never in such a straight-forward, reader-friendly, and well-reasoned order.

She starts with the history of standardized testing itself, which might put some readers off, but it is very critical. What standardized testing has served has always been two very oppo­site purposes—which are both bad because they come down to judging most individuals, as well as for judging “kinds” of peo­ple—by race, class, gender, etc. But standardized testing also has highlighted trends and biases of importance—that is bring­ing good judgment to the results and tolerating the considerable measurement error embedded in the technology of the instru­ments. Actually, Engel is kind and doesn’t dwell on how little these tests can tell us about how and why children give “wrong” answers, or why teaching “for” right answers is so damaging. She spends less time on the issue of narrowing the curriculum than other writers have. But she is crystal clear on what’s at stake in using such instruments to produce a modern democ­racy.

I’ve always been intrigued with our innocence in the face of thousands of years of assumptions about why some people are “lesser,” why the haves are naturally advantaged and the have­nots are naturally disadvantaged. At the nation closest to Amer­ica’s “soul”—England—with a reading of most of its standard literary classics, the story is told over and over: There is some­thing fundamentally inferior about the poor. Even reformer Charles Dickens explained the sensitivity and intelligence of his hero Oliver Twist by his genetic inheritance. Even his standard upper-class language had come to him “biologically.”

It is hardly then a surprise that the inventors of our systems of measurement have taken the results of such tests for granted. They would have tossed their researches, had common sense not prevailed—the winners and losers were precisely whom they expected them to be. In fact, that’s where researchers started— by comparing questions that winners got right and losers got wrong.

The tests were a perfect match, and it was called Science.

It is hard indeed for us overnight to slough off the mindset that blames the victims, that insists that, since it is a merito­cratic and individualistically free society, there is no excuse for failure. It’s either genetically predetermined (which we’re hap­pily not allowed to say), or a personal choice. Given that neither Angela nor I accept the genetic explanation (there are those out there who are ready to pounce on this explanation again), or that it matches the desires of the families or students of color, we’re distressed at the idea that the only alternative must be the sheer laziness or racism on the part of schools. We acknowledge some of the latter, but laziness is a word that covers up a whole host of other dilemmas that frequent external testing leaves un­touched and, in fact, makes worse.

And then Engel tackles the second story—from the testing industry’s low point in the late 1970s, to its current popularity (although it’s far more popular among politicians and leading elites than among the public at-large)—the tale of how the promising movement for “standards” got hijacked into a move­ment for standardization via testing. It was then that a promis­ing and critical moment for a different paradigm of reform was lost. There was a time that I thought “my side” would win— between 1975 and 1990, or thereabouts. The work of Ted Sizer had hit a nerve in American education—too idealistic, perhaps, said critics, but surely right on. Sizer placed no blame, pointed no fingers, but offered a different and sensible path out of a longstanding tension between liberal arts traditionalists and pro­gressive-minded reformers. There can be high standards without standardization and without elitism.

Within a few years, the language of standards became not an aspirational call, a glad waving toward a finer future, but a lock­step system of test preparation, scripted teaching, and incurious students. It deprives schools of their most important con­stituency—their roots in each and every community’s own experiences and wisdom, and their hopes for their young. Accountability may, as in the banking industry, require larger doses of localism than we’ve grown accustomed to thinking.

Or, as Engel notes in Chapter 3, testing can become a feigned system of accountability—a mystification on such a grand scale that few note the sleight of hand. She lays it out. And she also reminds us of some simple propositions that should direct real accountability. She hints at an uncomfortable truth—someone besides kids, parents, teachers, or even the larger economy may benefit from our misdirection. The quote Engel uncovered from Harold McGraw III stunned me. The testing industry with all its money, prestige, and political con­nections found a new market that far eclipsed the old one. The politics of President George W. Bush and the new role envi­sioned for the testing industry were married in a ceremony that produced No Child Left Behind. Disclosure: I’m a board mem­ber of the one and only “lobbying” group that concerns itself with testing fairness—FairTest—which operates out of a single room with three to four employees.

Chapter 4 takes us to the challenges we’re up against. Engel explores the issue of schooling and the economy, the appeal of privatization, the concept of merit pay, and teacher’s unions, and ends with poverty and race. Then, Chapter 4 switches to these questions: Is there a solution? Can we teach them to fish? Engel is optimistic—as I am too—that such answers exist, and she points us in the direction of producing children who can do bet­ter than fish for “the right answers,” which is the focus of Chap­ter 6.

Chapter 5 tackles the issue of choice—which is dear to my heart. I was a pioneer for pubic school choice, and like Engel, I still see it as critical to good schooling. But like her, I also see the wisdom of not trying to force everyone’s children into the same orientation toward schooling. Engel outlines four reason­able overarching approaches and why the solution must include making choices accessible as fully as possible. The dilemmas that choice offers—charter schools, magnets, or even vouchers—pose different trade-offs. She sees these trade-offs as related to the amount of money we are willing to spend on having a great edu­cational system. Too often, she suggests, the choices are dis­guises for spending less money on other people’s children.

And finally, in Chapter 6, Engel lays out some potential solu­tions. The answers lie in part in creating a national conversation that teachers, parents, and grandparents participate in—to open up our minds to the possibilities. Such a conversation would re­quire us to explore other acceptable forms of accountability that get closer to what it is we care most about. She’s properly impa­tient with the long conversations within academic circles, the whining of teachers (my word), and a show of sustained protest by those who already know better. The list is long—and includes a wide swatch of the American professional class, as well as its teachers and parents. But it’s not at the head of the line at con­ferences I attend. We even have alternatives ready to go, long used in the best of public and independent schools. (Note that the elite send their kids to schools that rarely use standardized tests and are not covered by NCLB.) We have examples from the inter national community. What we lack is a sufficient sense of responsibility to do something about it. That’s the underlying passion that comes through in this book.

Engel sums it up neatly, and I intend to memorize this: “We will always be negotiating who to become and what kind of world we want to live in. Our Constitution was created not so that government could shape our political, economic, and social system, but so that we the people could.”

And then, as Engel does throughout, she goes back to children and classrooms with the wonderful children’s story, Stone Soup. If we’re determined enough we can make soup out of any­thing. . . .

This is a book filled with teacher and parent stories, but al­ways in clear service of weeding out nineteenth-century notions of sorting and tracking—of who are the leaders and who the followers—that have infused themselves into the twenty-first­century culture of schooling—under new labels and false “scientific” theories. It’s also a reminder of what a difference it makes when the storyteller is close to the work to be done. It’s time for such experts to be part of the policy-team that has driven us into this dead-end with their infatuation with the mindless manipulation of numbers.

The book doesn’t ignore the sometimes bleaker side of the current situation, but it also provides inspiration and optimism about what an informed public can do. The book is an essential part of the toolkit for the reforms that can be undertaken to ful­fill the promise of education that has always been flirted with, often practiced here and there, and that could if we follow her wise words, be our future.