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Description
Sharon L. Nichols and David C, Berliner. 2007. Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 234 pp.
In this recent book, the authors declare that holding schools accountable through standardized tests is not only ineffective but also endangers the health of our public schools. Confident in their conclusions, they write: "There is absolutely no need for new research on high-stakes testing! Sufficient evidence to declare that high-stakes testing does not work already exists" (175). Such hyperbole permeates their work, which is more polemic than scholarship and marred by factual inaccuracies. Early in the work, they suspect they "vastly underestimate the problems [they] describe" (xvii). Yet, in an unabashed wave of self-importance, they compare their warnings about the damage of high-stakes testing to other unheeded warnings such as those that presaged 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Given the important questions that policymakers and academics are debating with the coming reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it is unfortunate that such prominent scholars are diverting attention from ways to improve an essential accountability tool. Despite its imperfections, high-stakes testing has introduced powerful new incentives that promote desired behavioral changes in students, teachers, and administrators.
Nichols and Berliner rest their case primarily on the obscure Campbell's law, which holds that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption... |
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