Standardized testing and the construction of governable persons

Abstract

While debates over standardized testing are ubiquitous, there has been relatively little consideration of how today's standardized testing practices have arisen. The current study provides a chronology of standardized testing within Alberta, Canada. Starting from prior work by Foucault and others on ‘governmentality’, we propose that the movement to standardized testing be viewed as part of a larger societal movement toward techniques of government that operate indirectly and at a distance. These techniques of government seek to ‘manage’ populations through the use of measurement tools and numerical calculations. We suggest that, although these techniques are directed toward populations, they also have specific effects on individual students, parents, teachers, and other participants in the education system. In particular, we contend that standardized testing programmes, by rendering the participants visible and subjecting them to public scrutiny, contribute to the construction of governable persons.

Notes

Dean Neu is Future Fund Professor of Accounting at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He has published more than 50 research articles in such journals as Accounting, Organizations and Society and the Journal of Education Finance.

Cameron Graham is a doctoral student at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada; e‐mail [email protected]. His research interests include public policy, education accounting, and globalization.

Cameron Graham is a doctoral student at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada; e‐mail [email protected]. His research interests include public policy, education accounting, and globalization.

Our overview of Foucault's work on governmentality and the related work of others is intended only to frame the arguments at hand. For broader introductions to the work of Foucault, see Burchell et al. (1991) and Dean (1994). Although several authors (e.g. Curtis 1995, Schrag 1999) have been critical of Foucault, we think that his analysis of the development of governmentality provides a way to understand the emergence of standardized testing, and to situate this emergence within the more general societal movements to techniques of governance.

For example, Haney's (2000) paper on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) devotes considerable space to discussing the numerical and statistical methods of the Texas testing regime. Consider also the comments of a Texas state attorney regarding Haney's participation in a lawsuit over alleged racial bias in TAAS. The attorney said, ‘One is that their numbers are flawed. But clearly, the issue is what's happening to the numbers during the period the TAAS has been in place’ (quoted in Balli 1999). Although the attorney is evidently concerned with what has ‘happened’ to the numbers, one has no way of knowing how this is ‘clearly’ the issue for anyone else. Education is abstracted and reduced, through testing, into highly aggregated numbers. The substance of the lawsuit may be racism in education, but the battle is over statistics.

The fourth term of reference, 4.4, is not quoted here. It deals with the mechanics of any studies MACOSA might commission.

We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for directing our attention to Hanson's work.

A self‐professed ‘Alberta‐based parent and community‐orientated educational consulting and research service’, SchoolWorks!, republishes the results of the standardized testing as part of their School Information Guide. The explicit goals of this guide include facilitating parental choices about which schools their children should attend. The on‐line introduction to this guide (SchoolWorks! 2002) states:

School accountability and greater choice in schools and school programmes are changing the face of public education. In the past, children from the community would naturally attend their neighbourhood school. However, with the funding following the student, open school boundaries, and the public's concern with educational standards, the accepted pattern of students attending their neighbourhood school is no longer the norm

With individual schools becoming more competitive in attracting students to their programmes, parents/guardians are faced with the difficult task of identifying the best school for their children. As public education becomes more consumer driven, the consumers—i.e. parents/guardians, students etc.—are asking for more information that they can use to compare schools and their programmes

Based on ‘effective schools’ research and our own field experiences with parents/guardians, we, at SchoolWorks!, have created The School Information Guide©. This practical guide stresses both product and process. Therefore, as parents/guardians work though this guide they will not only benefit from the results obtained but also from the processes of personally collecting information from schools. Increased involvement in this process will provide parents/guardians with additional information resulting in more informed choices

Archived copies of grade 3, 6, and 9 Alberta achievement tests (Alberta Learning 2001) show that the questions on social studies and science examinations are exclusively multiple‐choice. Mathematics tests are largely multiple‐choice, with a small number of numerical response questions. Six out of 50 questions on the grade‐9 mathematics test were numerical response. The remaining questions, and all questions on the grade‐3 and grade‐6 mathematics tests, were multiple‐choice. English tests include multiple‐choice questions, an essay‐writing question, and, for grade 9, an additional question requiring the student to write a business letter and address an envelope.

Scarce resources are a necessary assumption of microeconomic theory. Part of the function of the education system is to impose a regime of scarcity (Illich 1978). The ability to teach children, for example, appears to be widely distributed, as the home‐schooling phenomenon demonstrates. However, when almost all parents work outside of the home for wages, and teaching is delegated to credentialled professional educators, the ability to teach children is redefined in our society as a scarce resource. All the resources required for education are subject to the power of money, the scarcity of which can be controlled explicitly by the financial practices of government; money serving as a proxy for all other resources.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

CAMERON GRAHAM

Dean Neu is Future Fund Professor of Accounting at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He has published more than 50 research articles in such journals as Accounting, Organizations and Society and the Journal of Education Finance. Cameron Graham is a doctoral student at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada; e‐mail [email protected]. His research interests include public policy, education accounting, and globalization.