James G. Dwyer

Setting standards for parenting : By what right ?

Mental health professionals, like other professionals involved in family matters, feel constrained when advocating for the interests of children by the belief that parents are entitled to custody and control of their childrens lives, regardless of what others may think of their parenting behavior, absent severe harm to the children. This belief is morally untenable, and the legal doctrine of parental rights that is its concrete embodiment is inconsistent with other well-established legal principles and should be abandoned. Children alone should have legal rights in connection with their upbringing, and those rights should include an entitlement to much higher standards of parenting than the law presently imposes.

Introduction to symposium: School accountability and ‘high stakes’ testing

Th i s sym p o s i um i s a philosophical response to a political and social phenomenon – the recent surge in public schools’ emphasis on standardized testing. This phenomenon has occurred in several western nations, but has been particularly pronounced in the USA, where school policy has become intensely politicized and where federal legislation now mandates extensive ‘high stakes’ testing in schools throughout the nation. The unprecedented attention administrators and teachers now pay to preparing students for standardized tests, and the threatened penalties for schools and students who do not meet imposed standards, raise many questions for parents (and teachers) that the politicians dictating education policy appear unable to answer. Are the tests administered ones that encourage and detect sound educational practices? Can any standardized test do that? Are the consequences attached to good or poor performance fair? The articles in this symposium directly address these questions. Most of the authors in this symposium are American, so it might be useful to relate a bit of the historical and legal background to the current regime of high stakes testing in the USA. Standardized testing has long been a feature of the public school experience in most states in the USA. However, until 10 years ago (1994), such testing was largely confined to one administration in the elementary years and one in the secondary years. The results of the tests had practical consequences, if at all, only for a small percentage of students, and the consequences were just to secure remedial instruction for those students. Movement towards a heavily test-focused education policy, which became embodied in federal legislation in 1994, began in the early 1980s. In 1983, the US Department of Education’s National Commission on