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Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do To Change It.
By Peter Sacks.
Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999. 364 pages, $26.00
Readers who want to know what's wrong with America's preoccupation with standardized tests need look no further: This book will tell them in graphic detail. Readers who want to know what possible positive features there are to such a preoccupation will have to look elsewhere, however, as will those who want to know in any depth how to improve things.
The book is quite comprehensive in its indictment of our testing culture. Moreover, the author rightly recognizes that the problem is not just with tests or even just with their use, but rather with the educational and societal system in which they are embedded. Sacks points out that the preoccupation with tests has a number of costs:
It leads to a dumbing down of the curriculum. Instead of students being encouraged to think reflectively about and deeply process what they are reading, they often are encouraged to memorize facts, even nearly useless ones, if there is any reasonable possibility the facts will appear on achievement tests of various kinds. The facts are taught for their own sake, rather than as part of the fabric of a discipline.
It leads to narrowing the curriculum. Teachers start to teach only those topics they believe are likely to be on the tests, and to forsake teaching other things, even if those other things might be of greater value to the students.
- It leads to many students, who could excel in the work force, never getting the chance because their scores on various types of tests effectively derail their educational careers and later their occupational ascent. At the same time, it may lead people whose major strength is getting good test scores to have opportunities of which others may be more deserving.
It wreaks havoc with the selfesteem of those who work hard, receive good grades, but cannot attain the scores they need to get ahead, and in some states, even to get a high school diploma. It can also wreak havoc with parents' views of their children's capabilities. It leads to questionable and sometimes even fraudulent attempts to raise...