The Mismeasure of Education: A Review
Susan Notes:
This essay review of The Mismeasure of Education by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn
does what a good review should do: Offer insights to the reader about an important book. As Garrison points out: Few educational professionals are aware of the force of assessment history and how the current reform efforts echo so much of the driving force of this history. Certainly if teachers read this book they'd better understand the why and how of the current assault on them and the schools in which they teach.
Take a look at other opinions. These blurbs appear on the book:
"When the Obama Administration decided to spend the billions it got for schools as part of the stimulus package to launch the Race to the Top program and the NCLB waivers, forcing many states to adopt teacher evaluation based on changes in student test scores, leading experts warned that this "value added" system did not have a reliable scientific basis and would often lead to false conclusions. This sobering and important study of the long experience with this system in Tennessee (where it was invented) shows that it did not work, was unfair, and took attention away from other more fundamental issues." Gary Orfield Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA, Co-Director, Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA
"If The Mismeasure of Education offered only its penetrating new look at Conant and Coleman, it would be worth the price. But that's just the beginning. Horn and Wilburn uncover the obsessive instrumentalist quantification and apocalyptic rhetoric soapboxed by both liberal and conservative political elites. Their autopsy of value-added accountability reveals the pathology of ed reform's claim about teachers not being good enough for the global economy." Susan Ohanian Educator, Author, Activist
"A well-researched (and frightening) look at examples of shameful pseudoscience in America, the latest manifestation of which is value-added assessment for determining teacher competency... A well-documented and thorough analysis, inescapably leading to the conclusion that student test data cannot be used to determine teacher effectiveness. A must read for policy makers enamored of the idea that value added assessments will do what is claimed for them. They do not!....An excellent and scholarly history of how we got to an educational-testing/industrial complex, now promoting invalid assessment strategies that are transforming education, but not for the better. A scary book that should be thoughtfully read by those who value America's greatest invention, the public schools." David Berliner Regents' Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University
"The Mismeasure of Education is a magnificent work, an elegantly written, brilliantly argued and erudite exposition on why the "what," "how" and "why" of effective teaching cannot be adequately demonstrated by sets of algorithms spawned in the ideological laboratories of scientific management at the behest of billionaire investors... This book will serve as a sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of the nation's educational tribunals and their adsentatores, ingratiators and sycophants in the business community... The Mismeasure of Education will have a profound resonance with those who are fed up with the hijacking of our nation's education system. This is a book that must be read by everyone interested in the future of our schools. It is a book that advocates real educational justice, for student, teachers, administrators and the public; it is informed by impressive scholarship and compelling argument. It is surely to become a classic work." Peter McLaren Professor, GSEIS, University of California, Los Angeles, Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies, Chapman University
by Mark Garrison
Recently I was asked to talk to a large group of area educators and parents about the relationship between the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI) and the use of student test scores on high stakes standardized tests to evaluate teachers and principals-- so-called valued-added models (VAMs). Public criticism of this disfiguring of teacher evaluation and the Common Core testing regime continues to grow across New York State and elsewhere, giving rise to many public forums such as the one described below. More than 40,000 parents reportedly opted their children out of New York's Common Core tests this year. Many parents are "refusing the tests" on the grounds that consistent and vocal public concerns about the Regents Reform Agenda have been ignored (e.g., Strauss, 2013).
During the discussion following my talk linking the rise of the test-delivery Common Core regime and VAMs to cuts to education funding and privatization, one teacher likened her experience to being flushed down a toilet, "day after day," struggling but never being able to escape that dark vortex known as "education reform," which, she said, "sucks the life out of education" and renders any authentic work of students and teachers "wasteful." After the crowd had left, the event organizer told me that a teacher sitting next to him during the talk, "cried quietly for the first half hour." When I asked why, he said: "The talk put everything together for her, helped her understand the pain she had been experiencing over the last decade." In no small measure was my ability to "bring everything together" based on having just finished reading Horn and Wilburn's volume, The Mismeasure of Education (MME). Readers should know that MME is imbued with an activist spirit and so it seems imminently fitting to introduce the book in the light of its role in my own work as a public Research that Counts (Susan Ohanian Speaks Out):
does what a good review should do: Offer insights to the reader about an important book. As Garrison points out: Few educational professionals are aware of the force of assessment history and how the current reform efforts echo so much of the driving force of this history. Certainly if teachers read this book they'd better understand the why and how of the current assault on them and the schools in which they teach.
Take a look at other opinions. These blurbs appear on the book:
"When the Obama Administration decided to spend the billions it got for schools as part of the stimulus package to launch the Race to the Top program and the NCLB waivers, forcing many states to adopt teacher evaluation based on changes in student test scores, leading experts warned that this "value added" system did not have a reliable scientific basis and would often lead to false conclusions. This sobering and important study of the long experience with this system in Tennessee (where it was invented) shows that it did not work, was unfair, and took attention away from other more fundamental issues." Gary Orfield Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA, Co-Director, Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA
"If The Mismeasure of Education offered only its penetrating new look at Conant and Coleman, it would be worth the price. But that's just the beginning. Horn and Wilburn uncover the obsessive instrumentalist quantification and apocalyptic rhetoric soapboxed by both liberal and conservative political elites. Their autopsy of value-added accountability reveals the pathology of ed reform's claim about teachers not being good enough for the global economy." Susan Ohanian Educator, Author, Activist
"A well-researched (and frightening) look at examples of shameful pseudoscience in America, the latest manifestation of which is value-added assessment for determining teacher competency... A well-documented and thorough analysis, inescapably leading to the conclusion that student test data cannot be used to determine teacher effectiveness. A must read for policy makers enamored of the idea that value added assessments will do what is claimed for them. They do not!....An excellent and scholarly history of how we got to an educational-testing/industrial complex, now promoting invalid assessment strategies that are transforming education, but not for the better. A scary book that should be thoughtfully read by those who value America's greatest invention, the public schools." David Berliner Regents' Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University
"The Mismeasure of Education is a magnificent work, an elegantly written, brilliantly argued and erudite exposition on why the "what," "how" and "why" of effective teaching cannot be adequately demonstrated by sets of algorithms spawned in the ideological laboratories of scientific management at the behest of billionaire investors... This book will serve as a sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of the nation's educational tribunals and their adsentatores, ingratiators and sycophants in the business community... The Mismeasure of Education will have a profound resonance with those who are fed up with the hijacking of our nation's education system. This is a book that must be read by everyone interested in the future of our schools. It is a book that advocates real educational justice, for student, teachers, administrators and the public; it is informed by impressive scholarship and compelling argument. It is surely to become a classic work." Peter McLaren Professor, GSEIS, University of California, Los Angeles, Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies, Chapman University
by Mark Garrison
Recently I was asked to talk to a large group of area educators and parents about the relationship between the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI) and the use of student test scores on high stakes standardized tests to evaluate teachers and principals-- so-called valued-added models (VAMs). Public criticism of this disfiguring of teacher evaluation and the Common Core testing regime continues to grow across New York State and elsewhere, giving rise to many public forums such as the one described below. More than 40,000 parents reportedly opted their children out of New York's Common Core tests this year. Many parents are "refusing the tests" on the grounds that consistent and vocal public concerns about the Regents Reform Agenda have been ignored (e.g., Strauss, 2013).
During the discussion following my talk linking the rise of the test-delivery Common Core regime and VAMs to cuts to education funding and privatization, one teacher likened her experience to being flushed down a toilet, "day after day," struggling but never being able to escape that dark vortex known as "education reform," which, she said, "sucks the life out of education" and renders any authentic work of students and teachers "wasteful." After the crowd had left, the event organizer told me that a teacher sitting next to him during the talk, "cried quietly for the first half hour." When I asked why, he said: "The talk put everything together for her, helped her understand the pain she had been experiencing over the last decade." In no small measure was my ability to "bring everything together" based on having just finished reading Horn and Wilburn's volume, The Mismeasure of Education (MME). Readers should know that MME is imbued with an activist spirit and so it seems imminently fitting to introduce the book in the light of its role in my own work as a public Research that Counts (Susan Ohanian Speaks Out):
