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Paul Reville is a faculty member in the Administration, Planning, and Social Policy area at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also serves as executive director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, and as chair of the Massachusetts Education Reform Review Commission. Jane Buchbinder, editor of Ed. magazine, conducted this interview with Reville on the current state of standards-based reform in the United States, and the events that have brought us to this point.
Paul Reville: Nationally, we are in the midst of a movement to try to bring higher standards to public education, to measure progress against those standards with a variety of assessment instruments, and to hold folks that are part of the system—educational leaders, educators, and students—accountable for performance. We've taken some years to get to this point. The movement itself grew out of the dissatisfaction of employers and leaders in higher education about the quality of knowledge and skills that presented by graduates of public schools. Jane Buchbinder: When did that happen? Reville: You could say its most poignant expression was the "Nation at Risk" report in 1983. And then a number of strategies in terms of policy were tried in the mid- and late 1980s, but it wasn't until the early 1990s that there began to be a coalescence at the national level and many states, led by many governors and with the support of the federal government, around the idea of systemic school reform that had standards as the focus. The idea was that if you were explicit about your expectations for young people, and periodically measured progress as to whether the education was in fact providing students with the requisite knowledge and skills, and you were holding people in the system accountable for results, you would ultimately improve public education and achieve equity for students. The only way to be fair to all students is to expect the same thing of all students. The fairness did not lie in taking account of an individual's background and adjusting your expectations accordingly. Fairness lay in saying that we have an obligation as a society, at least at a certain high minimum standard, to deliver a set of knowledge and a body of skills to all children so that they can be viable in employment or higher education. It took the states longer than they expected to determine what the standards were and to write quality standards. Many states still don't have quality standards, though virtually all states have standards of one kind or another. Then, the whole matter of how you measure progress arose. Most states are using standardized testing, which is controversial in itself. And then they had to work on accountability systems. How would they reward outstanding performance? How would they sanction under-performance? What kind of response would the state have to results? The states were relatively inattentive to the business of building capacity, to questions of how you build the strength of the school system—particularly the teaching function—to actually educate students to that level. There is an assumption that they would figure out how to do it and that assumption turned out to be invalid.
We are now at the juncture in a number of states where tests have been implemented and have consequences for students. And as those consequences grow closer in states like Massachusetts and New York and the standards are high and the stakes are high, you're beginning to get a strong backlash against the whole movement, against the testing, and against what the testing is doing to education. Some critics are fond of saying, "Who ever expected education to change as a result of administering a test?" There is a simple answer to that: nobody! That was never part of the theory. Nobody ever thought that testing—weighing the cow—was going to grow a healthy cow. But because of the consequences associated with the testing, the testing has garnered so much attention that the testing is now mistaken for the reform as a whole. The testing is simply an instrument used to measure progress and guide improvement efforts. It also typically has some accountability function for adults first, and then secondarily for students. One of the problems we've had in some states is that we have made the consequences for students much more severe and we've done them first rather then having the consequences in place for the adults. In many places, we can't really guarantee that there has been the opportunity to learn these standards. Those students are then in a predicament. Students are being held accountable for learning but haven't yet had the opportunity to learn. So, in many cases, we are in the process of trying to allow more time for the achievement of the ambitious goals that we have set for ourselves. In some instances, you have teachers who are saying to the state, "If you think we can take all these students to this high level of performance, then please show us how. Because this is so much higher than what we have been doing before and we are not sure how to do it." Policymakers have responded, "We didn't really think that was our expertise. We can't tell you how to teach or how to go about it but we thought you'd know how to do that." So we are caught a little bit between the reality of our expertise and performance and the idealism of our aspirations. Buchbinder: Is that pretty much the agreement? This is the predicament and this is how we have gotten here? Reville: You have certain radical elements who said this is a business agenda that has been imposed on government, designed to get people to fit into the industrial model. Another school of thought says the whole movement is designed to make schools look bad so that you can then bring in a free-market model to take its place. But those are fringe theories. For the most part, I think people would agree with my view that standards-based reform is a common-sense strategy aimed at achieving real equity. Some might take issue with my description of the current dilemma. This isn't about testing; it's about standards and equity.
One of the interesting things about the controversy now is you have a variety of critics who are opposed to the kind of testing that is out there now. Many of them argue in the name of equity and many argue that the only fair thing to do for students is to exempt certain students from high standards by reason of disadvantages in their background. I believe such an exemption is not only discriminatory but a permanent handicap. You have a certain category of civil rights and advocacy groups that are saying, "Until we address the issues of poverty and injustice in the surrounding society, it is unfair to test kids in schools because if you do, you're going to get the same kind of results that we've always gotten, or kids are going to do worse, and if there are stakes and consequences, the poor will be unfairly punished." And they will suggest that they have evidence to demonstrate that. Then you have a group of people—whom I think of as the "fair-test"/no test people—who believe that testing is totally inadequate to render any kinds of judgments that need to be made here. They might be willing to tolerate a test, but they wouldn't be able to tolerate a test with consequences because they think testing is a weak matrix. They think that tests tend to oversimplify knowledge and skill, or if you make tests more complex, you have problems with inter-rating reliabilities. They have seldom, if ever, met a test they liked. Many suburban parents are opposed to the testing system because they think it threatens their advantage. They feel that they have mastered the system as it currently stands with the SAT and current tracking in a typical suburban school system. Now you are throwing in a wild card and this could trip up some of their kids and be a black mark in terms of their capacity to get into college and get ahead. So you have some pestiferous suburban complaints about this; other suburban complaints come out of a sheer sense of complacency, from people who say, "Our schools are great out here." These parents say, "We feel good about where we are because we get our kids into the right schools. We paid a lot of money for our houses. We like the schools the way they are. We don't want any interference from the state in what we are doing." There's another category of educators who feel this is constraining. They like the freedom associated with education. They use it in responsible ways to design their own curriculum, to design their own approaches to assessment, and they feel constrained by the reform movement. Of course, this isn't a curriculum; it is a set of standards, but they don't want to be bound in that way. It limits professional discretion. They argue that phrases like "teaching to the test" are common even though standards advocates would say, "Well, tests ought to be tests that you would want to teach to." They have to embody the skills and knowledge that you would want to have. Likewise, they say, "Too much time spent on testing, not enough time spent on education," as though the two are distinct from one another. Standards advocates would say, "Well, the testing is an integral part of education—demonstrating your mastery much as a figure skater spends hundreds of hours in practice and then eventually demonstrates the expertise in a competition." The testing is a mastery demonstration opportunity that's every bit as important as the practice that led up to it. Buchbinder: We've had standardized tests for a long time. How has their function changed? Reville: Most of our tests in the past have been norm reference tests. This is an important distinction. In a norm reference test, your score is relative to how other people did on the same set of test items, but nobody knows where the test items came from. They were just what somebody assumed people your age ought to know. Criterion reference tests measure your performance relative to a standard, and the standard is usually explicit and visible.
When you are having a problem with your car and you take it into the garage, you don't want someone to tell you, "Well, this car is better than 90% of the cars I've seen today." You say, "I want to know what's wrong and I want it fixed." A functional car is the criterion. It's the same thing with this testing. In general, this generation of tests is better than previous ones because test designers have tried to make them richer, more complex, more reflective of what the states are seeking through their standards than they have done in the past. Nonetheless, they have many of the same features: multiple-choice questions, for example, but far more questions of the open-ended kind, questions in which your work actually counts, or counts on a par with getting the correct answer...questions in which you have to show analytic capacity and the capacity to write persuasively, and things of this nature. The best of these tests are tests that you would want to teach to. The tests tell us how we are doing as educators. If the way that we have been doing it up until now isn't working for a significant percentage of kids, we better think of another way of doing it. We need to give to each child what he or she needs to get to the standard. And for some kids, that's 220 days a year because they are farther from the standard. It's like a hundred-yard dash. We are expecting everyone to finish at the same time, but some of our kids are starting twenty-five yards from the finish line, and others are three-hundred yards back, so the same treatment isn't going to work for all of them. Buchbinder: There are other theories: people who advocate for portfolios, for example? Reville: There's a lot of discussion about "multiple measures." What do you add to the existing evidence of competency to broaden your snapshot of a child so that you're sure that you're fair and that you haven't narrowed the curriculum in the way that you're asking the questions? The most popular form of a multiple measure is a portfolio assessment, which is very cumbersome to do on a large scale. A portfolio assessment is a great tool for a classroom teacher to use with children, but as a state assessment mechanism it's very cumbersome and difficult to administer. There are many different purposes and levels of assessment. A good teacher is doing assessment every day. It isn't assessment in itself that's abhorrent. What irritates those who are critics of the testing is usually the stakes associated with the testing. Buchbinder: And the stakes in this case...? Reville: In some states, the diploma will be withheld. There are some really tough equity questions. This kind of pressure was used as a lever on the system to improve performance, particularly when you didn't have hard accountability measures affecting adults. The idea was that the adults would come out in defense of young people to prepare them to meet the standard. Standards advocates would argue, "Why should we give a diploma to somebody who really doesn't have the skills and knowledge? That becomes a meaningless diploma." At the same time, I have trouble arguing with a parent who says, "You think a diploma is meaningless, but to my kid it has economic value." It does usually stand for something that differentiates that kid from the kid who didn't get one. Buchbinder: What do teachers need now? Reville: Teachers need help with how to do this. How do you take children who historically have not been able to succeed against the standards, teach them in different ways than we've done before, and get the kind of results that we've been talking about? The history of school reforms is a variety of interventions from political policy and theory that tend to bounce off the system and not really get to the heart of instruction. I think what reformers have learned over the past 10 years is that it's really all about instruction. It's all about teaching and learning. All the standards and assessment and accountability in the world won't make a damn bit of difference unless you change the nature of instruction, of that fundamental transaction between teacher and student. If we keep teaching the way we've been teaching, we'll keep getting what we've been getting in terms of results. If you're in a corporation, you have a strategic plan—you have a 10-year plan for getting from where you are to where you want to be. It's a big, complex undertaking. You are always revisiting that plan and adjusting it in light of the current realities. I think that's what we need to do.
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HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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