It's the minority inner-city schools especially where "teaching to the test" takes its terrible toll. Chicago public school teachers and principals have school closure and privatization held over their heads if they "don't deliver" on the standardized measures. But its never clear how much schools do and don't have to do with test scores, which have as much --- actually more --- to do with broad extra-school socioeconomic factors (poverty, employment rates, family fragility/stability, crime, stress, etc.) as with school factors. I should have added that the other and main thing I had going for me was a middle class family background with books (and people who wrote and read them) around the house. My mother taught for years in an inner city Chicago grade school and for years in an affluent white suburban grade school. I asked her the main difference and she said the stress levels you could feel in the inner-city students. What passed for routine levels of tension and fear in the inner city would have called for a referral to counseling and social worker intervention in the suburban schools, she said. In more affluent suburban districts parents and teachers wouldn't tolerate the same skill and drill (and mind-kill) curriculum as is common in urban environments (though less common of course in elite urban magnet schools, where higher levels of teaching and facilities are provided to keep middle classes from fleeing to suburbs). Such districts draw off some of the best teachers, who become demoralized by the urban testing regime among other things. In response to FC's response to keir, I'd add the savage irony that many of the white suburban kids are probably more likely than many inner city black kids to be reading and discussing classic works of black experience and struggle (e.g, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright's Black Boy, ML King's Trumpet of Conscience, Autobiography of Malcom X). Regarding higher ed...the smartest people I went to graduate school with never finished their doctorates. They were too engaged intellectually across disciplines and periods to develop the dumbed-down tunnel vision that professionalization requires. I find academia (at least at the non-elite level I inhabit) to be a fairly anti-intellectual environment in many ways. A big share of the work is clerical in nature and much of your mind energy is eaten up by rote tasks and mundane matters (maybe not all bad from a parecon perspective). And the structured thought control (from comps committee to dissertation committee to hiring committee to tenure comittee to the convention committees to the journal committees and "peer review" process) is daunting and terrifying to many. The post-9/11 political environment and the related ranting of such hysterical right wing freak shows as David Horowitz and Lynn Cheney is part of the problem but I've always had the worst problems with liberals and Cold War (and now War on Terror) social democrats and this long before the neo-McCarthyites took off. The most classically successful students I studied with were hardly the smartest per se. They were generally very good at picking a small area to richly mine and/or at massaging the right embattled ivory tower egos.

I don't deny that there are some valuable skills involved in writing tests. Afterall there are siverlinings in most things if we care to look. The point is whether it is appropiate to evaluate scholastic aptitude based on those criteria and allocate education opportunities accordingly. If we decide that these are the skillsets one should master then let's be open about it and teach them in school. Then everyone at least has adquate preparation before he/she steps into the ring. But do we want to turn our schools into test taking boot camps? Arguably one developes many valuable skills by being able to survive in the mean street. For examples, the ability of being calm and not panic in the face of life threatening situations; self defense techniques; the intuition to size up a person or a situation quickly; the ability to evaluate risks etc. But I doubt that a stint in the street gang would get you into Princeton.

"There is something to be said for the skills behind standardized tests... the ability to remain calm and not panic, ascertain data based on what is "given" or assumed, make reasonable guesses, return to problems later after having gone over other issues, etc. are all valuable." But should people be severly penalized because they cannot remain calm or just having a bad day? As you have pointed out blacks tend to do poorly in these tests because the stake is higher. Sure these are valuable skills but they have nothing to do with intellectual aptitude perse. There are diverse styles of processing information, individuals who are lacking in these skills often compensate with other qualities, e.g. perfectionists who don't like cutting corners, non linear learners who do not acquire knowledge in isolated chunks, etc. Standardize exam strikes me as a very poor way to train people on these qualities. I don't think being able to take tests is sufficient for someone in high stress professions like air traffic controller or the military. You'll need specialize training anyway. For others who want to acquire these skills there are more realistic venues like volunteering in ER or sign up for an outdoor survival course.

`There is something to be said for the skills behind standardized tests. Without real intellectual curiousity, they mean nothing, but the ability to remain calm and not panic, ascertain data based on what is "given" or assumed, make reasonable guesses, return to problems later after having gone over other issues, etc. are all valuable.` Yes but these things are often more innate then learnable. Me and several people I know happen to be born with it, we can show up to a test with absloutely no preperaton or knowledge of the material and ace it (my freinds moreso then me). A different freind has test taking anxiety, he is far better at math then I am, and yet manages to flunk all the tests that I do well on. Also, Bwong is right. In Japan it is quite normal for students to sleep all their way through school, and then when the test comes the teacher hands out a sheet of paper with all the answers to the test questions. They go home and study it, and concequentially do well on the test. Never mind the fact that they didnt learn a thing.

"bwong I agree on the factory analogy and would just add that it is just as accurately applied to much of "higher education" as it is to K-12." I competely agree. Another harmful effect(maybe the intended effect?) of high stake exams and emphasis on marks is that it actually kills the desire to learn. Students are distracted by the mock rat race from the love of knowledge. I remember a few years ago I was tutoring a young woman who was a straight A student. She was taking a physics course and I asked her if it covered special relativity. Her answer was "Than God. No" I felt sad.. Here was a bright young person who was supposed to be a model student. Anyone looking at her marks would be very impressed. Yet she showed absolutely no intellectual curiosity. If you're taking a physics course would you be at least a little bit intrigued by what the hell that Einstein really did? After working with her for a while I realized her strategy to keep a striaght A average was basically avoiding all intelectually challenging courses and strictly studying for exams.

"I never thought of your point about..the segmented-off cubicle.." I have written, supervised and graded enough exams to know that they are farces. I can't tell you how depressed I was whenever I had to invilgilate exams, seeing all these young people sweating on something so intrinsically worthless and here I was playing the jail guard. Whenever I could I would bargain for additional teaching duties just to avoid that. Exam is like a sport. You become very good at it with a lot of practise. But test taking skills have little to with learning the subject matter per se and they're not transferable. If you need a lot of practise to do well than tests are probably more of a measurement of reflex than understanding or other higher cognitive skills. I have to laugh whenver someone claim we function on a merit based system in debates of affirmative action. "Merit" for what? Chinese score high at standardized exams like SAT. It is often cited to support the "model minority" myth. Here is something you guys probably don't know. I was told there are prep books and classes for standardized tests accessible to only those who read Chinese.They drill you with the real questions.Apparantly they get them by sending people to take the tests. The question get recycled every few years. Having access to past exams is a huge advantage. But you can't find them in English prep books because of copyright. I heard the test agencies are now aware of it and are cracking down.

FC thanks for buying the book. I'm going to be talking about it on the Tom Pope radio show (I don't have station numbers I'm afraid) on Thursday the 20th between 12 and 1 PM EST. bwong I agree on the factory analogy and would just add that it is just as accurately applied to much of "higher education" as it is to K-12. Marx said something about university professors and sausage manufactory workers and being a visiting professor with more than 215 students and one TA (for the first half of US history)I must say I'm barely keeping up with the sausage assembly line. I used to speak to various groups in Chicago about educational issues. The audiences included Chicago Public School officials and I used to love horrifying them by pointing out that I'd gotten a PhD and published significant numbers of books, project studies, and articles and yet had never done particularly well on standardized tests. Truth be told, I was lucky to graduate high school: took one look at the horrible curriculum and chose the parking lot over the classroom. Part of what saved me was seven years (K-6)at John Dewey's initial Laboratory School in Chicago.

In a capitalist set up "education" is an "investment".Even though some educators may have more noble goals but at the policy level it's still basically no different from making widgets. It's not an accident that "education" and "training" are used almost interchangibly. The obsession of tangible, measurable results and "quality control" through testing are the results of importing factory philosophy wholesale into the school. But unlike in say, car manufacturing, in education we don't really have a clue what we are measuring. You are bound to get some data if you measure something but the numbers are meaningless unless you're meausuring something relevant. Test scores are completely irrelevant when it comes to good education. How often in real life do you have to solve a whole bunch of problems within an alloted time in a cubicle without access to references and peer advice? Anyone who has written tests like SAR or GRE knows they jokes. In the GRE you get multiple choice tests for phiosophy! Exams are just games. Some people are good at playing the game some people aren't. We collect a lot of numbers and compile a lot of charts. They confer a "scientific" aura even when the basis of these measurment are very shaky. This modern cult of numbers must be resisted(well this may sound strange coming from a mathematician)

The nations educational system, while bad, is not the cause, but an effect of a larger systemic problem. In essence, we are programed to see `reults`. Non `drill and grill` educational sytems do not involve sheets of paper that determine your child`s worth (and collectively a countries future worth). And therefore are dismissed by politicans as being inneffetive, and by paranoied parents as uninformative. This `results` issue is, of cource, based in capitolism.