In the last five years, we’ve witnessed a significant shift in the focus of the U.S. public education system. The shift is perhaps best illustrated by the proliferation of the public high school rankings appearing in national publications. U.S. News & World Report, well known for its university rankings, now publishes a ranking of best high schools as well. Unlike the university rankings, which take many factors into account (yet remain of dubious value), the high school ranking considers essentially one statistic: standardized test scores.

The massive movement towards standardized tests as a barometer for education has its roots in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. The act is a well-intentioned piece of legislation as its purpose is to improve the overall quality of American public education. It does so partially by attempting to measure schools’ success, as President Bush explained when he signed the bill into law:

The story of children being just shuffled through the system is one of the saddest stories of America….The first step to making sure that a child is not shuffled through is to test that child as to whether or not he or she can read and write, or add and subtract. The first way to solve a problem is to diagnose it. And so, what this bill says, it says every child can learn. And we want to know early, before it’s too late, whether or not a child has a problem in learning. I understand taking tests aren’t fun. Too bad. We need to know in America. We need to know whether or not children have got the basic education.

NCLB, the U.S. News ranking and any other measure that depends on standardized test scores has one important underlying assumption: that standardized tests accurately represent the goal of the education system. The question we must ask is this: are the skills we are imparting on students as a result of required standardized tests the same skills that will be useful to them in society? I would suggest that, in fact, standardized tests fail to measure one of the most important skills we can ever hope to teach: critical thinking. Critical thinking is the backbone of successful endeavors and the key to a quality education. University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, giving an address on the aims of education, described critical thinking this way:

Critical thinking is a rather straightforward process that involves asking important questions and making convincing arguments of your own in response to those questions. I am tempted to say that teaching critical thinking is all about teaching you how to argue, but that would be an incomplete description of the enterprise, because it fails to capture the fact that asking questions is also a crucial part of the process…We aim to produce graduates who have an instinct for the jugular, that is, individuals who are constantly on the lookout for interesting and important puzzles regarding the world around them.

Sounds like what we should be looking for out of a quality education, no? This is the point where the problem with tests arises. The fact is, standardized tests have a hard time testing anything other than simple, memorized pieces of information. Consider this representative item from the Virginia Standards of Learning examination for World History:

4. Louis XIV of France, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Peter the Great of Russia were all —

A. kings who allowed democratic reforms in their countries
B, descended from the same queen, Victoria of England
C. kings who were killed by their own people
D. absolute rulers of their nations

That question requires no critical thinking at all. There is no “interesting and important puzzle” even hinted at, despite the the fact that in a subject so broad as “world history,” you’d think there’d be one or two out there. If high-stakes standardized tests are tied to funding, to prestige (like rankings) and to a whole host of other desirable things, then in not too long, very little will be taught outside of the knowledge required to bubble in answer “D” for question four. Unfortunately for all affected students, that strategy misses the point. The goal of an education should not be to memorize facts, like the kind that are emphasized on state exams, but to learn how to think and how to communicate ideas effectively.

I have no good solution for the problem. Clearly, the pre-NCLB status quo in which vast numbers of public schools fail to teach anything at all is unsustainable. However, a system that pumps students full of useless knowledge without teaching them to think is equally unacceptable. This is where For A Better America and the collaborative power of the Internet come in. I hope that through productive discussion, we can start to tackle the issue.

So, what do folks think?