Daniel P. Resnick

Assessing the Thinking Curriculum: New Tools for Educational Reform

In America, educational reform and testing are intimately linked. Test scores signal the need for reform, as evidenced by the attention paid to declining scores on college entrance exams and standardized tests, to Americans’ weak performances on international comparisons, and to the percentages of students failing certain kinds of items on our national assessments. Tests are also widely viewed as instruments for educational improvement. Calls for better performance by American schools are almost always accompanied by increases in the amounts of testing done in the schools. New tests, or more active scrutiny of tests already in place, are frequently prescribed, both as a source of information for a concerned public and as a form of “quality control” and an incentive to better performance by educators and students. This link between testing and efforts at educational reform is not new—it has been a feature of efforts to improve American schools since at least the end of the nineteenth century (D. P. Resnick 1982). In each new round of reform, testing theory and practice have been refined and elaborated. Tests are so ubiquitous in this country’s educational life, however, and the test instruments we use are often so technically elegant, that it is difficult to imagine proceeding in a different way. Complaints about testing and tests, from those who claim that tests block opportunities for certain social groups and those who point to the limited range of human competence assessed by the tests, bubble up whenever the amount and visibility of testing increase. These complaints sometimes lead to modifications of tests, but there is rarely sustained or widespread consideration of the possibility that the very idea of using test technology as it has developed over the past century may be inimical to the real goals of educational reform.

Standards, Curriculum, and Performance: A Historical and Comparative Perspective:

This article considers how educational standards are established and maintained, and how they can be improved in American schools. The authors argue that curriculum (what is taught) and assessment (the way we judge what is learned) play the largest role in shaping what is demanded in schools and thus what our students can be expected to learn. Neither issue has received adequate attention in current debate over the state of our schools and the compelling need for school reform. This article addresses both issues in a historical and comparative perspective and argues that higher standards are within reach through the development of new and parallel initiatives in curriculum and evaluation. The authors outline potential improvements through (a) upgrading the curriculum, (b) utilizing new forms of assessment, and (c) rethinking the concept of tracking to .focus on high standards in the middle school. They consider these steps as being among those most likely to meet current needs.

Benchmarking Education Standards

Recently, standards have become the currency of education reform efforts in the U.S. However, there is no international consensus on what constitutes “world-class” education. The New Standards Project has designed research to describe standards in other countries by using the case-study approach of ethnography to collect data (e.g., curricula, texts, exams, student work, and professional views). The review/analysis of the data is organized by a set of fundamental questions, the answers to which constitute a contextualized account of what students are expected to know and be able to do.

Reexamining The Bell Curve

Occasionally, very occasionally, big books appear in the social sciences that make scholars and the lay public take notice. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is one of those publishing events.1 The Bell Curve is big both in size, more than 850 pages, and in scope. It draws on a large social science database and deals with themes of broad social significance. The authors have provoked a counterliterature of criticism, qualification, and confrontation that has advanced the enterprise of social research. Without the contest over methods, argument, and policy implications that are generated by the publication of such big books, public understanding would lag even further behind scholarship, and scholarship itself would lose its edge.

Science, Public Policy, and The Bell Curve

In the final section of The Bell Curve (pp. 387-552) Herrnstein and Murray deal explicitly with the implications of their argument for public policy.1 In so doing, they move with different degrees of success from the realms of humanist argument about inequality, through statistical analysis of quantitative social data, to public policy advocacy. We cannot take the measure of so ambitious a work without stepping back and answering some pointed questions. Where does it break new ground? Where does it rehearse old arguments? What are its public policy implications?