I think that this is most evident in the case of public higher education.
As this becomes more and more of a universal entitlement in the US,
projected costs skyrocket. The argument from the right is basically that a
lot of kids in public colleges don't belong there, are not sufficiently
benefitting from costly college instruction. One of the functions of
testing has always been to assign (or more properly to legitimate the
assignment of) unequal life-chances after school. This once meant access to
college, but as the bar has lowered (more kids going to college in each
cohort, but also lower exit standards from secondary schools), there is
less and less of a cut. It's apparently quite true that many middle class
high school students don't make greater academic efforts because they know
they can get into college anyway. This may not apply to those students we
are most concerned about, but it does apply to a lot of kids sucking up
public money sitting in college classes (where they also don't make
anywhere near a maximal effort to repay the investment in them).
This argument from the right is not entirely wrong-headed so long as all we
look at is the bottom line: total enrollments and costs. The crucial
problem, in my opinion, is that if we raise the bar for the middle class (a
very wide category in the US) in the form of standardized testing, we will
automatically also exclude most poorer students, many of whom do indeed
work very hard to achieve academically in a system heavily stacked against
them culturally from the start. There are many hard-working but low-scoring
minority students who belong in public higher education in the seats now
occupied by higher-scoring neer-do-wells from more privileged, or more
culturally congruent backgrounds.
Hence, I think, the strong pressure on the right to insure that no such
reversal of the natural order of privilege takes place; all the calls for
reducing the costs of public higher education are accompanied by campaigns
to define those who do not belong by class and race and ethnicity and
language, rather than by motivation for academic achievement. Hence the
rollbacks of affirmative action, the insistence on English monolingualism
... and the pushdown in age of high-stakes testing so that those foredoomed
to fail can be identified, in the press, as Others well before it is time
to let them be considered on their merits as candidates for the smaller
number of university seats.
It is not politically possible to say that there are no seats available for
qualified students; it is possible to say that the students are not qualified.
In New York, vast numbers of minority students will fail the new state
examinations needed to get a diploma and qualify for college entrance.
Indeed the numbers would be large enough to cause major social unrest, and
so there will be quiet moves to set the bar a bit lower. But there is a
dilemma here ... if a high school diploma is prima facie qualification for
college, how can we grant enough diplomas to keep minority communities
quiet and still save on the costs of higher education? Only by setting
higher college entrance requirements, and it is a safe bet we will see
this. In some ways in New York it is already happening (by eliminating
remedial courses at universities), and I imagine similar moves are occuring
elsewhere. We can anticipate a campaign to redefine what it means to be
'college material' as something well above high school graduation, and also
a campaign to say that a college education is not as necessary for economic
success as is (cheaper) technical training.
Most of us work in universities. Are we content that the students who come
to us be admitted solely on the basis of standardized test scores? What
else matters? and how do we identify it on the scale needed for a workable
admissions process? How do we distinguish between those willing to
sacrifice to learn what we teach, and those who plan to just get by on the
cultural capital of their class privilege?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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