Update:
Corporate Interest in High-Stakes Testing

Dennis Fox

August 2002

An earlier column of mine -- Corporate-Sponsored Tests Aim to Standardize Our Kids (2000) -- is included in Censored 2002-2003: The Top 25 Censored Stories. Project Censored asked for this very short update about media coverage for the book (due in September from Seven Stories Press).

How we choose to educate our children is always important, so it's not surprising high-stakes tests attract significant attention. Downplaying profit motive as well as research exposing testing's technical flaws, the corporate-owned media generally echo the corporate-initiated call for education reform using corporate-designed standards and tests. Despite occasional criticisms of implementation details, the media pay minimal attention to whether testing obscures rather than remedies underlying economic disparities between high- and low-achieving school districts, or whether the corporate interest lies not in expanding children's skills and horizons but in channeling them into vacant spots in the future workforce's lower realms.

President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act," which passed overwhelmingly with the help of liberal Democrats, mandates annual testing for every public school child in the nation from third through eighth grade. The Bush plan has generated increased alternative press coverage of state and federal testing issues, including some proponents' financial interests in testing companies and/or private schools, Bush's close family ties to the major testing company McGraw-Hill, and the role of organizations like the Business Roundtable. Similar reports sometimes appear in mainstream media, though there the connections between corporate elites and state decision makers are often ignored or dismissed as evidence of business's pro-education savvy.

Despite increased coverage, it's important to remember that the bipartisan corporate-directed testing boom began long before Bush. If there's an underlying plot, it's corporate, not Republican or conservative. Too many liberals still believe testing is merely part of a well-intentioned plan gone wrong.

Encouragingly, test opponents from both left and right have scored scattered victories in a number of states, delaying test consequences through strategies ranging from lobbying to boycotting. It remains to be seen if this movement withstands the new federal mandate.

A related issue, just beginning to surface, is President Bush's second education plan: requiring states to beef up civics education. This return-to-the-Fifties effort will attract corporate support as well as mainstream media pundits who bemoan the dropping voter rolls even as they dismiss calls for significant electoral reform that might provide some reason to show up at the polls.

There was no mainstream media response to my story, though I used an earlier version as one of my regular columns in the weekly Brookline TAB. A handful of alternative media outlets ran it.