Wayne Au

High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis

Using the method of qualitative metasynthesis, this study analyzes 49 qualitative studies to interrogate how high-stakes testing affects curriculum, defined here as embodying content, knowledge form, and pedagogy. The findings from this study complicate the understanding of the relationship between high-stakes testing and classroom practice by identifying contradictory trends. The primary effect of high-stakes testing is that curricular content is narrowed to tested subjects, subject area knowledge is fragmented into test-related pieces, and teachers increase the use of teacher-centered pedagogies. However, this study also finds that, in a significant minority of cases, certain types of high-stakes tests have led to curricular content expansion, the integration of knowledge, and more student-centered, cooperative pedagogies. Thus the findings of the study suggest that the nature of high-stakes-test-induced curricular control is highly dependent on the structures of the tests themselves.

Unequal by design : high-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality

Series Introduction Michael W. Apple 1.The Zip Code Effect: Educational Inequality in the United States 2.We Are All Widgets: Standardized Testing and The Hegemonic Logics of the Educational Assembly Line 3.The Educational Enterprise: NCLB, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Equality 4.Steerage at a Distance: High-Stakes Testing and Classroom Control 5. Devising Inequality: High-Stakes Testing and the Regulation of Consciousness 6. Standardizing Inequality: The Hidden Curriculum of High-Stakes Testing Afterword Zeus Leonardo

Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian analysis of high‐stakes testing and social reproduction in education

High‐stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high‐stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present paper applies Bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device to explain how high‐stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social relations in education. This analysis finds that high‐stakes tests, through the structuring of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the selection and regulation of students’ educational success.

Meritocracy 2.0: High-Stakes, Standardized Testing as a Racial Project of Neoliberal Multiculturalism.

High-stakes, standardized testing is regularly used within in accountability narratives as a tool for achieving racial equality in schools. Using the frameworks of “racial projects” and “neoliberal multiculturalism,” and drawing on historical and empirical research, this article argues that not only does high-stakes, standardized testing serve to further racial inequality in education, it does so under the guise of forms of anti-racism that have been reconstituted as part of a larger neoliberal project for education reform. This mix of neoliberalism, high-stakes testing, and official anti-racisms that are used to deny structural, racialized inequalities are a manifestation of what the author calls, “Meritocracy 2.0.”

Interrupting Globalization as an Educational Practice

During the past decades, the literature on what has come to be called critical pedagogy has become extensive. Although this is an important development, all too much of that literature and not a few of the writers have been less connected to the actual practices of real teachers in real schools in real communities. Because of this, a good deal of this movement has been rather rhetorical and has stayed at too abstract a level. This has not only limited its effects but also meant that many of the writers on critical pedagogy are not themselves able to be taught by practicing educators who are already engaged in building models of critical curricula and teaching and putting them into practice in schools throughout the country. Rethinking Globalization demonstrates why it is important for all critically oriented educators to make such connections. It is quite a valuable resource both at the level of classroom practice and as a statement of how one can embody critical pedagogical principles into the daily life of teachers and students in those same real schools. To understand its contribution, we need to situate it into the larger ideological and educational context to which it is responding. In November of 1999, the World Trade Organization held its ministerial meetings in Seattle, Washington. In preparation for those meetings, the Seattle Host Organization took part in the development of several curricula

Politics, Theory, and Reality in Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy generally seeks to expose how relations of power and inequality, (social, cultural, economic) in their myriad forms, combinations, and complexities, are manifest and challenged in the formal and informal education of children and adults (Giroux, 1997; McCarthy & Apple, 1988; McLaren, 2005). However, this may actually be too general a statement, for the term “critical pedagogy” is something of a sliding signifi er that has been used in multiple ways to describe multiple things. Indeed, at times critical pedagogy seems to have been used in such broad ways that it can mean almost anything from cooperative classrooms with somewhat more political content to a more robust defi nition that involves a thorough-going reconstruction of what education is for, how it should be carried out, what we should teach, and who should be empowered to engage in it. This more robust understanding – one in which the two of us are grounded – involves fundamental transformations of the underlying epistemological and ideological assumptions that are made about what counts as “offi cial” or legitimate knowledge and who holds it (Apple, 1979/2004, 2000). This involves a commitment toward social transformation and a break with the comforting illusions that the ways in which our societies and their educational apparatuses are organized currently can lead to social justice. A more robust understanding of critical pedagogy is also based increasingly in a realization of the importance of multiple dynamics underpinning the relations of exploitation and domination in our societies. Issues surrounding the politics of redistribution (exploitative economic processes and dynamics) and the politics of recognition (cultural struggles against domination and struggles over identity), hence, need to be jointly considered (Fraser, 1997). At the very root of these concerns is a simple principle. In order to understand and act on education in its complicated connections to the larger society, we must engage in the process of repositioning. That is, we must see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions (Apple, 1995). This repositioning concerns both political and cultural practices that embody the principles of critical pedagogy; but it also has generated a large body of critical scholarship and theory that has led to a fundamental

Reviewing Policy: Freire, Critical Education, and the Environmental Crisis

At the outset of this essay, we need to position ourselves. Both of us have long histories as educators who work with schools and communities on issues of crucial importance to them. Both of us are part of a tradition of critical education that seeks to democratize the ways in which knowledge, teaching, participation, funding, and so much else are now dealt with in education. And both of us see clear relations between acting in the educational arena and acting in the larger society. Because of this, we have also been influenced in various ways by work that is similar to or comes out of a tradition exemplified by Paulo Freire. Having said this, however, neither of us is simply Freirian or an unquestioning “disciple” of Freire. These introductory points are important, given what we shall say in our analysis of the arguments made in the book about which we will speak. The publication and distribution of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1974) was a landmark event in the field of education. Since its original publication and subsequent translation into many languages, Freire has influenced millions of people worldwide as the corpus of his work has been disseminated during the past 30-plus years. Pedagogy of the Oppressed alone has sold more than 750,000 copies since its publication in 1970 (Contiuum International Publishing Group, 2005), and a review of the literature would find that a cottage industry of publishing and research that numbers in the thousands has sprung around the political and pedagogical contributions of Paulo Freire (Apple, 1999; Schugurensky, 1998). For better or worse, such widespread distribution of Freire’s work has meant that his words and ideas have been reinterpreted within settings that are radically different from his original context of Brazil in the early 1960s, and Educational Policy Volume 21 Number 3 July 2007 457-470

The Curriculum and the Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion

Two plaques marking the death of a well-known European sailor can be found on the Philippine island of Mactan. One of these plaques reads: On this spot Ferdinand Magellan died on April 27, 1521, wounded in an encounter with the soldiers of Lapulapu, chief of Mactan Island. One of Magellan’s ships, the Victoria … sailed from Cebu on May 1, 1521, and anchored at San Lucar de Barrameda on September 6, 1522, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the earth. (Pinguel, Wei, and Shalom, 1998, 15)