Testing Times

Moreover, these judgments of success are not made only by those involved in this school. The city's mayor recently commented on the school's achievements in a letter to the state education commissioner, noting that the school's “success rate in graduating at-risk students is approximately 20 per cent higher than the City School District's average rate.” In addition, the school “boasts some of the District's highest attendance rates, highest SAT scores, lowest suspension rates, and lowest dropout rates.” The mayor concluded that this school's “non-traditional, yet rigorous process for demanding accountability and assessing knowledge serves its students well.”1 This then is a school that has not only kept its unique vision alive, it has also passed the tests of a school's success that have been set over its 30 years.

Yet, what happens when this school, an oasis of non-traditional practices, is confronted in this current era of educational accountability by an entirely different vision of what a successful school should be? A vision embodied in newly mandated state standards and standardized tests? A vision that, in fact, parallels the over-standardized, over-tested types of schools which the school's original founders turned their backs on 30 years ago in their search for a successful alternative? One would common-sensically expect that any form of governance, state or local, would not change ‘a winning team,’ but in the new forms of governance, educational success does not exempt schools from systematic new forms of interference.

In the new regimes of governance in education, control of education is passing from the trusted coalitions of teachers, students and community that have been painstakingly developed in schools such as this. In a more general sense, control is passing from internal educational agents and student and parental communities towards external forces representing a different range of interests.2 Lobbying efforts by corporations and industrial interests impinge hugely on the judgments of politicians and state education commissioners. These forces drive educational governance in wholly new directions. New patterns of external and symbolic control typically focus on testing, transparency, and accountability. Whilst understandable in principle, in reality such methods often collide with the delicately constructed ecology of school life. As such globalization wreaks environmental havoc in the world generally, so, too, can its specific effects in schools grievously damage the local ecology of an educational environment.