Contributed Commentary on
Volume 6 Number 1: Dorn The Political Legacy of School Accountability Systems

13 January 1998

Craig B. Howley Appalachia Educational Laboratory howleyc@ael.org

Search as one may, one encounters redundant libraries of treatises and guides on test uses and even misuses--including uses in policy. I had searched in vain for a critical, contextualized, discussion of high-stakes testing. It seemed merely to be an accepted fact of life. A critical reading of the history and distortions of accountability-as-performance-testing apparently did not exist, until the appearance of this article. Sherman Dorn has done education a good turn with his analyses in "The Political Legacy of School Accountability Systems." Special virtues in this piece include Dorn's clear-headedness about professionalism, sensitivity toward the history and formation of educational discourse, the importance of community context and diversity, and, generally, a steadfast refusal to see in history an inevitable progress.

Dorn's work will be especially helpful in the preparation of an article about accountability in the rural context, which a colleague and I are just beginning. Accountability, it seems, is needed because schools have become so remote from their publics, and the social construction known as the public is itself losing coherence. Rural schools are allegedly very close to their "communities" (their public). Widespread evidence for this claim is much thinner than one would suspect, but in most rural schools, faculty and staff are nearly all local people who interact continually with one another in social and civic encounters outside the school walls. Perhaps this sort of informal phenomenon is what constitutes the oversight for which accountability schemes are intended (unconsciously, of course, in the minds of the framers of such schemes) to substitute. If this is so, the substitution is particularly unsuited to the terrain of rural existence.

Dorn is especially to be thanked, as well, for not demonizing tests. Standardized, norm-referenced tests are both the products, and the poor innocent victims of the technocratic worldview. They are not going away anytime soon, and they can be theoretically helpful in understanding the pattern of a child's accomplishments. Dorn notes the utility of some of these tests for parents of special needs kids; the truth is that most parents could profitably take a similar interest and discover a similar utility. Most teachers of my acquaintance do not, however, find aggregate classroom or school results particularly helpful. They understand the game and they are cynical, widely.

The one usage for which norm-referenced tests, among the gamut of all "standardized" instruments, exhibit wondrous utility is quantitative research. But, of course, bureaucrats, politicians, and government functionaries (a.k.a. "policy makers") have even less respect for researchers than for teachers. More's the pity; but this is a very useful article for those with the institutional leisure to write and think about schools.