William J. Reese. Testing Wars in the Public Schools

After the federal law known as No Child Left Behind took effect in 2002, the use of written achievement tests in America's public schools became a major political issue—or so we thought. William J. Reese has qualified, if not questioned, this common belief by arguing that the importance of achievement testing as a political issue really dates to the mid-1840s. In a book that devotes most of its attention to a brief but bitter confrontation between Horace Mann and Boston's grammar school masters, Reese asserts that Mann's insistence on written rather than oral examinations for promotion “sparked a debate about the politics, meaning, and virtues of testing that has never ended” (p. 101). Before Mann's time, most teachers assessed their students by conducting regular recitations in class and final examinations in public. But were such oral examinations a satisfactory measure of student achievement? According to Mann and his reform-minded friends, they were really a sham, popular with teachers and parents but totally inadequate because they were based on impressionistic evidence. To obtain credible data written tests had to be administered. Inspired by Mann's Seventh Annual Report (1844) as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, some of those who agreed with its conclusion—that the state's public schools were in declension—won a majority on the Boston School Committee and proceeded to impose their will on what they perceived to be a hidebound educational system. In the summer of 1845 six of those reformers administered written promotion examinations to some grammar school students. Those in favor of keeping things as they were stoutly resisted the examinations, but when the tests were marked, the reformers claimed vindication. The results, they said, demonstrated that most students had learned by rote, memorizing but not understanding. Their teachers were to blame.

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