{"id":587,"date":"2006-06-16T11:49:34","date_gmt":"2006-06-16T15:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=587"},"modified":"2006-06-16T11:49:34","modified_gmt":"2006-06-16T15:49:34","slug":"standardized-testing-and-accountability-have-a-complicated-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=587","title":{"rendered":"Standardized testing and accountability have a complicated history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve caught up on other work tasks, caught a line drive in my leg, and caught up with some reading, I&#8217;ve only pecked away at the remaining tasks on chapter 1 (on the political roots of accountability). Well, not really&#151;I&#8217;ve received quite a bit of advice on the history of standardized testing and accountability and skimmed a lot of sources. As usual when I hit this type of passage, one subtopic (the history of standardized testing) deserves a full-length history in itself, and while there are plenty of books on parts of it (Gould on IQ, Lehmann on the SATs [with plenty of qualms by historians], etc.), there isn&#8217;t a well-researched academic history of standardized testing as far as I&#8217;m aware.  But that&#8217;s not the book I&#8217;m writing.  I only have a few pages for it.<br \/>\nThe themes that <em>are<\/em> popping up are going to be familiar to historians:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the way that experiences with testing establishes a &#8220;grammar of schooling&#8221; for standardized tests (see Cuban and Tyack&#8217;s book for a discussion of that term)\n<li>long-term business relationships between testing firms and states before the 1960s established an easy route to accountability\n<li>social networks from early-20th-century researchers to late-20th-century folks in the guts of state departments of education (e.g., the three-degree difference from Charles Judd to Tom Fisher, the head of state testing in Florida who retired just a few years ago)\n<li>resistance to the use of testing to judge schools in the 1960s (with the National Assessment of Educational Progress) and later\n<li>two key researchers <em>outside<\/em> colleges of education who carried ideas into the policy realm (James Coleman and Pat Moynihan)<\/ul>\n<p>To what extent were civil-rights motives important to the start of the modern accountability movement?  I&#8217;m seeing considerably mixed evidence, and I have to make a judgment call on that, obviously. As an historian, it&#8217;s one of those big-picture questions that I prefer to sleep on. I suspect it requires a nuanced reading of the evidence that just isn&#8217;t in my head yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve caught up on other work tasks, caught a line drive in my leg, and caught up with some reading, I&#8217;ve only pecked away at the remaining tasks on chapter 1 (on the political roots of accountability). Well, not really&#151;I&#8217;ve received quite a bit of advice on the history of standardized testing and accountability [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-9t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}