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Andrew Dominguez
Dr. Bo Wang
English 278T: Rhetorical Traditions
23 September 2009
Race to the Top: The Rhetoric of Change?
When Barack Obama was campaigning for office, he made some pretty rousing
condemnations of George Bush’s educational policy (No Child Left Behind), even going so far
as to criticize its Orwellian emphasis on standardized testing and surveillance. During a speech
to the 146th Annual Meeting and 87th Representative Assembly of the National Education
Association, Mr. Obama stated, “Forcing our teachers to spend their time teaching to a test at the
expense of music and art and the 21st century skills needed in order to compete in this world,
that's wrong.” However, if the recently implemented Race to the Top Initiative and Common
Core State Standards are any indication, President Obama’s stance on education isn’t likely to be
much of a departure from what we had with George W. Bush. As a matter of fact, when you
examine the underlying rhetoric, it becomes apparent that both leaders’ policies are founded on
the same naive faith in logical positivism. Thus while Obama and education secretary Arne
Duncan may portray themselves as agents of change, their ignorance is actually setting the stage
for a strikingly reactionary agenda. By failing to understand the socially contingent nature of
language and reality, they are allowing the national discussion of educational reform to remain
limited to the discourse of the corporate bottom-line. And as long as the scope of reform talk
stays focused on the rise and fall of standardized test scores, our educational objectives will
continue to be distorted in undesirable ways.
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In fact, the ultimate goal of this movement seems to be manufacturing an educational
crisis that will allow public schooling to be judged a failure and turned over to the private
market. From this perspective, the rhetoric of accountability seems like an insidious means of
advancing the imperial march of global capitalism. Therefore, because our very freedoms are at
stake, it has become imperative to reconsider the rhetoric of standardization through the lens of a
more progressive educational theory. According to veteran educator Marion Brady, if we are
going to save education, we need to “stop basing education policy on the opinions of business
leaders, syndicated columnists, mayors, lawyers, and assorted other education ‘experts’ who
haven’t passed the 10,000-hour test—10,000 hours of face-to-face dialog with real students in
real classrooms, all the while thinking analytically about what they’re doing, and why” (Brady).
As the following examination will show, the alternative is to allow the last semblances of our
democracy to be co-opted by an absurdist corporate totalitarianism.
Race to the Top: Narrow Rhetoric and Hidden Agendas
The positivist rhetoric that is being used to sell the Race to the Top initiative has
managed to narrow the debate to two options: you are either for the type of “change” that leads
to higher standardized test scores or you are a supporter of the “status quo.” However, secretary
Duncan’s vision of “change” is nothing more than an intensification of what we have already
seen under the failed No Child Left Behind Act: “more rigor, more tests, more international
comparisons, more ‘data-driven decision-making,’ more math and science, more school closings,
more Washington-initiated, top-down reform policy as the primary cure for education’s ills”
(Brady). For example, a central component of the Race to the Top initiative is a $4.35 billion
fund that is being used to bribe states into eliminating legislation that places limits on charter
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schools and prevents teacher performance from being evaluated based on student test scores. In
order to be eligible for a portion of this money:
a State must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student
achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal
evaluation. Research indicates that teacher quality is a critical contributor to student
learning and that there is dramatic variation in teacher quality. Yet it is difficult to predict
teacher quality based on the qualifications that teachers bring to the job. Indeed, measures
such as certification, master's degrees, and years of teaching experience have limited
predictive power on this point. Therefore, one of the most effective ways to accurately
assess teacher quality is to measure the growth in achievement of a teacher's students.
Current law in a number of States presents an obstacle to efforts to improve teacher
quality by prohibiting data regarding student achievement from being tied to teachers for
the purposes of evaluation . . . Without this legal authority, States would not be able to
execute reform plans relating to several selection criteria in this notice, because these
plans must require LEAs (local education agencies) and schools to determine which
teachers and principals are effective using student achievement data.
Although the authors claim that, “teacher quality is a critical contributor to student learning,”
they never explicitly define what “teacher quality” might mean. However, the language in this
document makes clear that education is considered to be nothing more than the mechanical
transfer of information. Students are basically “‘receptacles’ to be filled by the teacher. The
more completely she fills the receptacles, the better teacher she is” (Freire 72). According to this
logic, teacher quality becomes a matter that can be judged solely by the performance of students
on standardized tests. And because this argument is founded on the positivist rhetoric of the
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corporate bottom line, qualifications such as “certification, master's degrees, and years of
teaching experience” are not considered to be of any value unless they produce numerical results.
Hence, anything that cannot be quantified by an exam is erased and rendered irrelevant.
Not surprisingly, this rhetoric has proven rather persuasive to the greater American
audience. After all, we are a capitalist society that believes in pay for performance. If corporate
compensation is based on productivity, it is assumed that teacher pay should be based on the
same types of incentives. After all, if you want to measure teacher quality, what better way than
to test students and examine the numbers? The ensuing data should theoretically quantify the
degree of successful data transmission and hold teachers accountable for their work. The
implied alternative is a “socialist” system where teachers are able to avoid being held
individually responsible for their “productivity.” And because the proposed method of
evaluation (standardized testing) is justified by the seemingly objective authority of science and
numerical data, it manages to establish itself as beyond scrutiny.
Social Languages and Constructed Reaities
Nonetheless, closer examination reveals that this policy is based on a dangerously
simplistic understanding of learning and literacy. For one thing, it presupposes the conception of
language as a transparent nomenclature that merely describes an independent reality. With the
multiple-choice model, a test taker is asked to read a de-contextualized passage of writing and
then determine the “correct” interpretation from a limited number of options. Reading is not
seen as a deliberate theoretical practice but a matter of deciphering a text’s natural meaning.
According to Catherine Belsey, this sort of positivism results from the belief that “texts, those
which are in a special way worth reading, tell truths—about the period that produced them, about
the world in general, or about human nature—and in doing so, they express the particular
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perceptions, the individual insights of their authors” (2). However, Belsey also goes on to
explain that this common sense notion of language contains a central paradox. It is supposed
that “the facts of nature are there for everyone to see and to be plainly represented; [however]
some people (high and solitary minds) perceive these facts more keenly and, if they are artists,
portray them invested with a nobility not apparent to everyone, or in other words, represent them
differently” ( 9). Herein lays the contradiction. On the one hand, common sense presumes the
existence of a transcendent reality that can be directly communicated by an artist/writer to a
sympathetic reader. Yet, if the world can be perceived and represented in different ways that are
“not apparent to everyone,” then there seems to be a lack of a central perspective from which all
meaning becomes intelligible.
In the absence of such a center, literacy scholars explain that meaning is actually
produced conventionally through the interaction of social groups. In What Video Games Have to
Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Gee presents the example of a birdwatching club
in order to illustrate this concept. He explains that, “The first thing the club does is see to it that
new members come to share a lot of experiences of the world of birds and birding with the other
members, so that they will share some common patterns and ways of completing them when they
have seen only some features in a pattern” (193). These shared patterns and experiences are
conventions that allow individuals to function as members of the group. It is not a matter of
whether these patterns, or the attendant ways of reading and interpreting the world, are
transcendently or universally correct. Rather, it is a matter of approximating the shared ideals of
the particular social groups we wish to become a member of. According to Gee, “If you want to
join a birdwatching club, you [may] have to admit that the patterns in your head about sparrows
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are ‘wrong’; if you don’t want to join the club, then the patterns may very well be just fine from
the point of view of some other group, if only your own culture, community, or family” (196).
This understanding of literacy provides a direct challenge the positivist ideology of the
standardization movement (where words are thought to have transcendent meanings that learners
simply decode in order to arrive at a "correct" interpretation regardless of the social context).
For one thing, Gee’s analysis reveals that, much like the features of various birds, words can take
on a number of meanings within different settings. The word "light," for example, can mean
distinctive things when it is employed in a religious context or in a physics classroom. In a
religious context, "light" is a likely reference to the spirit, God, or even honor. However, in
physics "light" might be used to signify a particle, beam, or wave. Therefore, it we wish to
become literate in either of these domains, we need to learn how meanings are constituted by
their attendant worldviews. According to this logic, "we can say that people are (or are not)
literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the equivalent of 'reading') and/or
produce (the equivalent of 'writing') meanings in the domain . . . Thus, the rap artist who can
understand and compose rap songs but not read print or musical notation is literate (can give and
take meanings) in the semiotic domain of rap music, but not print or music notation literate"
(20). And vice-versa.
Critical Thinking and Conformity
From this perspective, standardized testing comes to represent a remarkably oppressive
scheme. If meanings are socially constructed by members of particular social groups, then it is
impossible to imagine that a multiple choice test can accurately measure a generalized reading
ability. Instead, it would seem that such tests merely measure the degree to which a person’s
worldview (pattern in their head) approximates that which is represented by the test (i.e. the
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discourse of power). This ultimately results in an anti-democratic system that marginalizes those
whose language differs from the mainstream and prevents the type of critical thinking that could
lead to empowerment.
According to Paolo Freire, this type of standardization (which he calls the “banking
concept” of education) constructs students as “marginals [who] need to be ‘integrated,’
incorporated into the healthy society that they have ‘forsaken’” (74). This is to be accomplished
by filling them with the teacher’s superior knowledge. In this manner, education becomes a
matter of coercing students to passively accept a version of reality that benefits those in power:
this concept is well suited to the purposes of oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how
well people fit into the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.
The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority
prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more
easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking
education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the
methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance between the teacher and the taught, the
criteria for promotion: everything in this ready to wear approach serves to obviate
thinking. (76)
Because this pedagogy makes reality appear transcendent and unshakable, people surrender to its
conditions—unaware that these conditions can be changed and even more unaware of how this
might be accomplished. As Freire states: “The more students work at storing the deposits
entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their
intervention in the world as transformers of the world. The more completely they accept the
passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is” (73).
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The Absurdity of Scientific Measurement
When these positivist assumptions are subsequently wedded to the rhetoric of scientific
measurement, it becomes almost impossible to challenge the standardized testing movement.
After all, science has assumed the role of a transcendent signified in the modern world; it is
thought of as nothing more than “a mere set of instruments and methods . . . a good and absolute,
and is thus circuitously endowed with the philosophic function of God as the grounding of
values” (Burke 30). Therefore, as long as test results are rendered in terms numerical figures,
people will continue to believe that they transcend the realm of human subjectivity and are
representations of immutable truths. From this perspective, questioning the results derived from
standardized testing begins to appear as absurd as questioning the validity of a thermometer’s
temperature reading. Nonetheless, Kenneth Burke urges us to realize that, “any purely secular
power, such as the application of technology, would not be simply ‘good,’ but could become
identified with motives good, bad, or indifferent, depending on the uses to which it was put, and
upon the ethical attitudes that, as part of the context surrounding it, contributed to its meaning in
the realm of motives and action” (30).
The validity of Burke’s warning is demonstrated in the recently published Making the
Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. In this book, Todd Farley, a
fifteen-year veteran of the standardized testing business, reveals how this industry is essentially a
capitalist “theater of the absurd” where the methods for determining test scores are about “as
standardized as snowflakes” (50). Before he was hired to score responses on standardized
exams, he had assumed that the job was performed by “virtual legions of educational experts—
surely in white lab coats, wearing glasses and holding clipboards, probably at some bastion of
Ivy League learning—that could make perfect sense of it all” (16). However, he soon discovered
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that these companies are essentially staffed by temporary employees working for a low hourly
wage: “standardized testing [is] a codependent relationship between the companies that have
millions of tests to be scored (willing to hire almost anyone they can to get the job done) and the
unemployed folks who have college degrees but not enough sense to really make use of them
(willing to take whatever job is available)” (229 – 230). As a matter of fact, Farley reports that a
number of professional test scorers even struggle with the English language. He describes one
individual who “misscored one student response because he didn’t know mortified meant the
same thing as embarrassed, while he erred in scoring others because he didn’t know bummed out
meant ‘depressed’” (211).
Although proponents of high stakes testing are sure to be scandalized by such a lack of
“standardization,” their predictable response will be a call for more qualified readers who can
give these responses the “right” score. However, this completely misses the point. The fact is
that language always involves interpretation and there is no such thing as a “correct” score that
can exist independent of human judgment. As Farley makes clear, “with 100 scorers, there was
always someone that would disagree with the score given to any paper” (45). Nevertheless, these
companies sell their services based on the supposed “reliability” of the numbers they produce. In
the world of standardized testing, reliability is determined by whether or not two scorers place
the same score on a particular piece of writing. For this reason, Farley explains that “The
questions were never about what a student response might have deserved; the questions were
only about what score to give to ensure statistical agreement” (146). And this need to produce a
high reliability statistic almost always leads to unscrupulous practices: “Eventually, given the
ambiguity of the work . . . I just began to change their scores. If I saw a scorer I trusted (Wendy,
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for instance) had disagreed with a scorer I didn’t (Harry), I simply changed Harry’s scores to
match Wendy’s . . . This ensured that our reliability would be acceptable” (93).
Beyond the hopelessly naïve idea that it might be possible for diverse groups of
individuals to score essays in the exact same manner, Farley describes how psychometricians
(who never see the test or the responses) also “predict” the scores that the essays will get before
they are even scored. Validity then becomes a matter of scoring them in a manner that is
consistent with these predetermined mathematical calculations. For example, if the
psychometricians predict “between 6 and 9 percent” will receive a score of 1 on a particular
writing sample, then the numbers are made to match their prediction. Farley recounts an incident
where he was part of a group of scorers who were not coming across as many 1’s as the
psychometricians had predicted they would. After his supervisor told them that they needed to
find more 1’s, Farley says that, “because I had no choice in the matter, I found more 1’s. I found
1’s that I thought were pretty clearly 2’s, and I found 1’s that I thought should certainly be called
‘off task.’ If, however, the omniscient psychometricians wanted 1’s, I’d give them 1’s” (118).
This insider’s exposé leaves no question that the supposed “scientific validity” used to
justify standardized testing is built on an irrational house of cards. However, this really should
come as no surprise. After all, even someone with the most rudimentary knowledge of learning
and literacy understands that communication is not an exact science. If it were, then information
would pass seamlessly between individual minds. But the fact that people can have instances of
miscommunication just proves that literacy shouldn’t be measured by mathematical calculation,
since any attempt to impose a scientific rationalism on language use is bound to end in the same
type of absurdity and oppression we are witnessing today—where psychometricians (who, again,
never even see the tests) make predictions, which low wage essay scorers work to make come
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true. And then the results of this bizarre process are used to determine teachers’ and students’
fates.
Charter Schools, Privatization, and the End of Democracy
Although it becomes obvious that standardized testing can never measure a student’s
facility with an a priori reality, there is actually something that it is good for. In “Test Today,
Privatize Tomorrow,” Alfie Kohn explains how standardized tests are actually the perfect vehicle
for transmitting corporate values:
Albert Einstein pointed out a long time ago that not everything that is counted counts.
Nowhere is that more true than in the field of education. But if you’re a politician who
only knows about counting votes, or a corporate executive who follows sales charts, then
you may adopt a simplistic view that [test scores] getting bigger over time must represent
progress. It’s much more challenging to think about issues such as intrinsic motivation to
teach or learn, intellectual exploration, and so on. (1)
Much like figures on sales charts, standardized testing data constitutes individual human beings
as objects, measuring the degree to which they are in compliance with a codified authoritarian
ideology. In this sense, “knowledge” comes to be defined in terms of the degree to which an
individual has been inscribed by the worldview contained in the test. By this logic, mastery of
standardized curriculum indicates not only submission to an agenda, but possession of the
cultural capital valued by corporations. As Kohn explains, standardized testing data does not
measure intrinsic motivation, creativity or critical thought. Instead, it privileges a particular
definition of knowledge (passive acceptance, capitulation to authority, etc.) that is beneficial to
corporate interests—and codifies students for subsequent placement within their greater
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structure. Thus it makes perfect sense that big business would argue in favor of educational
standardization.
However, the imposition of rigid curriculum is only one part of a larger agenda.
According to Alfie Kohn, there is even a “desire on the part of conservative ideologues to
privatize education” (2). In fact, Kohn explains that this movement toward privatization is “most
energetically advanced by those who despise not just public schools but all public institutions”
(4). This is because public institutions exist beyond the nexus of private control. Nevertheless,
through the rhetoric of standards and accountability, private interests may have found a way to
subvert the democratic process: “All [of those in favor of privatizing schools] demand higher
standards and more testing, and all of them look for ways to turn education over to the
marketplace where it will be beyond the reach of democratic control” (Kohn 11).
From this perspective, the rhetoric of standardization can be seen as an insidious means
for taking control away from actual students and teachers and imposing a narrow agenda upon
them. Whereas a democratically functioning school system has checks and balances (elected
school boards, unions, etc.) to prevent limited interests from taking complete control, with
authoritarian content standards and testing surveillance this obstacle has nearly been surmounted.
The logical next step is to set impossible goals (100% on grade-level by 2014) and declare the
public school system a failure when it is unable to achieve them.
Though these claims may sound conspiratorial, their truth can be found in actual policy
maneuvers. In 2003, Massachusetts Board of Education chairman James Peyser (who previously
served as the director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston based think tank devoted to the
application of free market principles to state and local policy) responded to a high pass rate on
the MCAS exam (an exam necessary for high school graduation) by saying that the minimum
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passing grade needed to be raised in order to keep the test challenging and meaningful (Kohn 5).
Such actions just prove educational standardization is not designed for transporting schools to a
utopia where all students can be declared proficient. Instead, this rhetoric is being used to
manufacture a crisis that will finally allow the public school system to be judged a failure. Then
it will be easier to get people to accept privatization, and funnel more ideological control and
public money into private hands. In fact, Susan Neuman, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and
Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, now admits that No Child Left Behind
was “a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and
‘blow it up a bit.’” According to Neuman, "There were a number of people pushing hard for
market forces and privatization" (qtd. In Wallis).
When you take all of this into account, it becomes clear that Obama’s Race to the Top is
yet another policy designed to subvert academic freedom by allowing private interests to gain
control of an otherwise public institution. It is essentially an intensified version of No Child Left
Behind; however, the Race to the Top initiative manages to take this agenda one step further,
requiring that states remove any law that might “prohibit or effectively inhibit increasing the
number of charter schools in the State (as measured by the percentage of total schools in the
State that are allowed to be charter schools) or otherwise restrict student enrollment in charter
schools.” From this perspective, it will never be possible for test scores to rise high enough. As
Kohn stated, “corporate ideologues” are fundamentally dissatisfied with the very existence of
schools as public institutions. Therefore, any attempt to, “feed the accountability beast is based
on the rather desperate hope that we can satisfy its appetite by providing sufficient evidence of
excellence. [But] this is a fool’s errand. It overlooks the fact that the whole movement is rooted
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in a top-down, ideologically driven contempt for public institutions, not in a grassroots loss of
faith in neighborhood schools” (Kohn 11).
For those of us who believe in democratic ideals, this Orwellian scenario should be of
great concern. In the end, entrusting decisions about this country’s schools to the standardized
testing industry basically amounts to “trusting an industry that is unashamedly in the business of
making money instead of listening to the many people who went into education for the more
altruistic desire to do good” (Farley 241). And when our educational agenda is determined by
private interests, the public welfare is subordinated to marketing and profit-making. According
to Alfie Kohn:
Making schools resemble businesses often results in a kind of pedagogy that’s not merely
conservative but reactionary, turning back the clock on the few changes that have
managed to infiltrate and improve classrooms. Consider the stultifyingly scripted lessons
and dictatorial discipline that pervade for-profit charter schools. Or have a look at some
research from England showing that ‘when schools compete for students, they tend to
adopt safe curriculum, and to tailor teaching closely to test-taking. (3)
This, in turn, results in curriculum that discourages critical thinking and engenders passive
acceptance. And when people are not taught to critically evaluate information, they become
caught in a relentless cycle of indoctrination and ideological control, all of which is granted
authority by positivist notions about language and testing.
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Works Cited
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Brady, Marion. “The One Reason Duncan’s Race to the Top Will Fail.” Washington Post, 4 Nov.
2009. Web. 8 Nov. 2009. <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/race-to-the-top/myguest-today-is-marion.html>
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkely: University of California Press, 1969.
Farley, Todd. Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.
Sausalito: Poli Point Press, 2009.
Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum International, 1970.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Kohn, Alfie. “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow.” Phi Delta Kappan 85.8 (2004): 1 – 11.
Obama, Barack. "Speech to the 146th Annual Meeting and 87th Representative Assembly of."
National Education Association. Butte, MT. 5 Jul. 2008.
United States. Department of Education. Race to the Top Fund. 29 Jul. 2009. 26 Sep. 2009
<http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/proprule/2009-3/072909d.html>.
Wallis, Claudia. “No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?” Time, 8 Jun. 2008. Web. 8 Nov. 2009.