K–16: Our Dogmatic Slumbers

Michel Foucault would have found rich material in dissecting America's structures of primary and secondary education, increasingly constituted as they are by a regime of accountability and assessment. In Massachu setts, a state often cited as leading the nation in the development of this regime, history teachers must prepare students for state tests by cover ing just enough information about several hundred historical events or issues to enable their students to get the right answer. The curriculum guide to the Massachusetts English Language Arts assessment lists well over a hundred recommended books that teachers might wish to use in their classrooms. But lest some students be unfairly advantaged by hav ing read books that might appear on the tests, the textual excerpts in those tests don't use examples from any of the recommended books. If we put aside for a moment the issue of the fundamental educational value of these tests, the approach to date has produced at best mixed results: National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are essentially flat, while evidence from international comparisons (PISA and TIMSS) shows that American children's academic skills are too often a mile wide and an inch deep (Beatty). As a result, students are consistently unable to answer questions that do not match a familiar format. Nor is there better news with regard to our use of "pure" ability testing such as the SAT. As Rich ard Rothstein has persuasively argued, future life prospects, measured in