Oppression and the Commodification of Education in the Era of Standardized Testing: Looking Through Kenneth Howe’s Lens of Equal Educational Opportunity
Kenneth Howe’s (1997) ideas about equal educational opportunity as they apply to American public education are imbedded in a belief system he defines using three distinct theories of social justice that serve as a framework for three competing interpretations of equal educational opportunity. This essay will summarize how Howe contextualizes equal educational opportunity within a framework of social justice before applying his ideas to the issue of standardized testing in American education. Howe interprets the standardized testing that has emerged from education reform as punitive. As such, he stresses the importance of moving beyond Gutmann’s (1999) concept of nonrepression in favor of nonoppression, “to protect groups that are threatened with marginalization and exclusion from meaningful participation” (p. 67), which is what is happening as a result of the culture of standardized testing, defining oppression using Iris Marian Young’s five forms (p. 70). Implicit in Howe’s argument about testing, however, is the notion that the business model not only continues to drive education, but has raised the stakes to new heights, where education, a field that in previous centuries was one with civic intent, has become a vehicle for economic utility, resulting in a widespread and continuing gap in knowledge and power that is rendering a majority of the American population captive.
Howe identifies “three theories of distributive justice within the liberal democratic tradition” (p. 23) that shape the way that we think about education in American society: libertarianism, utilitarianism, and liberal-egalitarianism. While libertarianism espouses freedom and liberty, Howe finds its tenets problematic, particularly concerning its beliefs regarding free market economies, which inherently results in unequal distributions of goods and wealth, creating great disparities between the haves and the have-nots, an untenable situation when applied to education (p. 23). Furthermore, Howe is flabbergasted both by the libertarian notion that the circumstances people are born into ultimately do not affect their life chances, as well as the lack of sense of social responsibility libertarians have for others in the larger society (p. 24), again, beliefs that conflict with what he later develops as a theory of equal educational opportunity.
Just as Howe finds fault with libertarian beliefs, he is equally disappointed with utilitarian ones. As an educational belief system, utilitarianism has been slowly gaining momentum for the last hundred years – since every state mandated compulsory elementary education at the beginning of the 20th century. Howe defines the economy-based “meritocratic utilitarianism” as one in which “government ought to distribute resources in order to achieve desirable results” (p. 25). What is key here, however, has nothing to do with education for any type of democratic ideal – participants in the democracy are not being educated to become contributing members of a society who can think and question. Instead, the sole purpose of education for those who subscribe to the ideas of utilitarianism is to equip students with the skills they need to become contributing members of the workforce. That is not to say that a utilitarian perspective does not allow for attempting to “level the playing field,” unlike libertarians, for they believe that the more workers who are trained and equipped to enter the workforce, the better the benefit to corporate America, and the more the power elite will prosper. While it was common to hear the mantra of Reaganomics that a rising tide raises all boats, and a populace raised not to think readily subscribed to the belief of what was good for the wealthy would eventually trickle down to them, history has now shown us that this was a charade. Utilitarianism views the necessity of citizens as functioning in useful capacities in society – but this usefulness is not to be confused with contributing, for example, to the body aesthetic. There is no room for the creativity of artists, dancers, writers, or musicians unless corporate entities are able to profit from their exploitation. But who determines who – or what — is useful? What happens when an individual is not useful to the society’s corporate interests? One can easily make the argument that our prisons are filled because having them in such a state not only serves to house those deemed unsuitable in the utilitarian society, but also provides a function for an entire prison industry. Howe writes that such a belief system is problematic and that utilitarianism “fails to provide an adequate foundation on which to ground the principle of equality of educational opportunity” (p. 26).
In the end, Howe positions himself in what he calls an alternative philosophy, liberal-egalitarianism, a view he calls the “participatory educational ideal” (p. 26). He argues that liberal-egalitarianism surpasses the inadequacies of libertarianism and utilitarianism in four basic ways: it values the good of the individual, the good of the group, is need-based, and is results-based (Howe, p. 26). Because of these factors, Howe says the philosophy is interventionist in nature, but only as the concerns apply to education in society, not other areas, which differentiates it from philosophies that might be considered broader attempts at addressing societal stresses, or what some may deem socialist policies (Howe, pp. 26-27).
Under the umbrella of these three philosophies, Howe develops an argument that begins with three interpretations of equal educational opportunity that become the basis for his discussion of what he perceives to be major issues of equality in American education in formulating his radical liberal framework: formal, compensatory, and participatory interpretations. Here, a formal interpretation “identifies equality of educational opportunity with the formal structure of educational institutions. In its purest form, it requires only the absence of formal barriers to participation based on morally irrelevant criteria such as race and gender” (pp. 27-28). The problem with a formal interpretation, according to Howe, is that it is insensitive to social issues such as socioeconomic or language status, and has no inherent sense of social responsibility. A second interpretation of equal education opportunity is the compensatory model, whose “goal is to help shape desirable educational careers by compensating for characteristics of individuals that disadvantage them in educational institutions” (Howe, p. 29). Although this interpretation appears noble in principle, several aspects of it are troubling according to Howe and others. Not only does it assume a deficit model, but in doing so, it “diverts attention from the underlying structural sources of inequality associated with social class and, in the process, serves to legitimate and perpetuate vast inequality” (Howe, p. 29). Essentially, the compensatory model tells us that the status quo is okay – just as long as we throw a little money at it to try to rectify the issue, which is not the way to bring about long-lasting, systemic change. While Howe argues that the compensatory view is better than the formal view, it is its embrace of the status quo that makes him uneasy (p. 31). As a result of his philosophical dissatisfaction with both the formal and compensatory interpretations, whose belief systems are evident in aspects of both libertarianism and utilitarianism, it is no surprise that he embraces the participatory interpretation of equal opportunity, an idea established in Amy Gutmann’s Democratic Education (p. 42). The participatory interpretation of equal educational opportunity, like the liberal-egalitarian philosophy under whose auspices it falls, values not only the importance of the self-worth of the individual, but also the importance of maintaining a group identity, “because maintaining one’s group identity, and having what flows from it respected and taken seriously, is inextricably bound up with self-respect” (Howe, p. 31). Moreover, Howe also recognizes that any given society invariably consists of subdivided groups and acknowledges that any formal implementation of his framework “require[] establishing new rules and procedures that guarantee all groups are generally recognized” (p. 69). While Howe finds the participatory interpretation the most plausible one, he by no means finds it flawless. In a perfect world, for example, issues of race, gender, or disability – considerations that should be morally irrelevant – would not matter. Sadly, in our world, they are issues that surface, and, Howe says, “the participatory interpretation exacerbates the problem because it opens the ideal to negotiation” (p. 32) in effect bringing issues to the surface for address – some might argue that this is better than burying them and pretending they don’t exist, advocating for the power of positive dialogue over subversive subtext.
As Howe applies his ideas about equal educational opportunity to the issue of testing, his primary concern lies in fairness. Given how he begins the chapter, with a quotation discussing the purposes of examinations in the Chinese educational system (p. 91), it is evident that Howe is positioning his argument about educational testing as the function of a utilitarian system that must determine the skills and usefulness of its constituency in order to drive the economy to feed business interests and government greed. Even when he discusses the two views that exist in educational testing – technicist and consequentialist – only to later state the differences between them as little more than nuance (p. 99), indicates that his real message about testing is that it is inherently unfair on many levels. It is clear that Howe views the state of educational testing in the United States as falling under a formal interpretation of equal educational opportunity, as testing is mandated by law, yet, at the same time, while proponents argue it to be a cure-all that “raises the bar” in order to help all students achieve, critics assert that testing does little more than exacerbate already grave problems facing struggling students and schools, thereby unsuccessfully functioning in the compensatory capacity in which it may have been intended (pp. 100-101). Nevertheless, with the current focus on standards and assessment, there is no doubt that testing, textbook, and tutoring companies are becoming richer, while the students who need help the most are being left further and further behind. Howe connects this to his idea of a participatory ideal. With government and business dictating a curriculum of mindless testing and rote memorization, what is being left behind, on both the political and personal levels, is the inculcation of the basic tenets of the importance of being a member in a democratic society. Miraculously, social studies does not appear on standardized tests, so students are not learning what it means to participate in their society. Similarly, students are not being taught to think critically, because tests require rote memorization. Howe asserts, “U.S. public education is indeed in serious trouble” (p. 107). This doesn’t mean that Howe is against testing, but what he is against is “educational assessment only when it is practiced in a way that is blind to the requirements of equality of educational opportunity” (p. 107).
Furthermore, if we are to have equal educational opportunity in testing, we must have testing that is demonstrates nonoppressive, according to Howe. According to the criteria established by Iris Marion Young’s Five Forms of Oppression, cited in Howe (p. 70), the culture of testing that has taken over the educational landscape in the United States is wholeheartedly oppressive. First, it is exploitive. Education is now big business – for profit. “The testing industry already consumes millions and millions of educational dollars,” writes Bill Ayers (2001, p. 117). Similarly, there is also a growing tutoring industry created through the No Child Left Behind Legislation. One web site, EducationIndustry.org, is aimed at prospective business owners – no education experience necessary — to suck them into the education industry, because education, just like everything else in the United States, is not about our children, it’s about making a dollar. Just the idea that education has become an industry is indicative of the transformation from its origins. We now see the business model applied to education – the commodification of education. Similarly, a recent visit to a Sylvan Learning Center web site revealed that it will work with SLM Financial, a subsidiary of Sallie Mae, to help parents struggling financially to finance their K-12 student’s tutoring needs to prepare them for testing. Moreover, the Michigan Department of Education is required under No Child Left Behind to provide Supplemental Education Service Providers – tutors – to students whose school districts fail under the act. Interestingly, it has allowed tutoring centers, like Sylvan, to prosper. Is it coincidence that Sylvan Learning Centers represent the largest block of SES providers on MDE’s 7-page list, with 25 of the 112 available choices for parents in the state, no doubt partly because of their corporate identity and slick marketing provided to franchise owners? Companies are operating not for the benefit of students, but to exploit them and their families in order to make a dollar, and the government is facilitating the process.
The drive to standardize testing is also resulting in the marginalization of our students. Howe writes, “[E]ducational testing works to disadvantage various minority groups as well as girls and women” (p. 92). In addition, “Standardized tests … distort the performance of people who are culturally or linguistically different, regardless of ability, intelligence, or achievement” (Ayers, 2001, p. 112). Standardized tests are constructed in such a way that students’ voices are not meant to be heard or respected – they are being judged by a nameless, faceless other that negates their value as both individuals and members of a larger society.
To further argue that standardized testing qualifies as an oppressive activity, it also results in feelings of powerlessness for those who engage in it, as they are unable to participate in the authorization process because their voices do not matter. Kozol (1991) conveys the powerlessness of students engaged in the drill-and-kill testing routine of an inner city high school: “They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination … They know how to pass the tests … I call it failure by design” (p. 143). For students not to become agents in their own learning, they have lost power and have lost hope.
Of the five forms of oppression, cultural imperialism is the one that is most prevalent, and perhaps the most applicable applied to the issue of testing, and Howe has a difficult time acknowledging that this can even be rectified, especially given the difficulty of eliminating predictive bias – particularly bias in favor of White males – from tests (p. 96). He notes, “All it can do to improve predictions of who will perform well given the criteria of performance associated with those who have historically enjoyed advantages within unjust institutional arrangements” (p. 96). I think Howe recognizes that eliminated bias goes well beyond any arguments in education, which is why this form of oppression, cultural imperialism, is one of the most frequently occurring. Cultural imperialism is a deficit assumption model, assuming that the status quo – the way we’ve always done things – is okay. Applied to testing, it assumes that we should keep on testing as we’ve always tested, because any other ways of doing so would disrupt the system too greatly. Critics like David Berliner (2006) argue that we need to look at other factors influencing student test performance before making any determinations about things like, say, curriculum (p. 950). Similarly, Ayers (2001) finds the nature of standardized tests – the way we’ve always constructed them – to be problematic, as they are constructed to ensure that only half of all students could fall above the fifty percent mark (p. 112). Even worse, elitists like Charles Murray (2008) assume that some students can never achieve, reinforcing the notion that achievement will always fall neatly into a bell curve distribution (p. 21).
Finally, because standardized testing in the United States subscribes to a White male, predominantly middle class world view, students who are other are expected to conform and compromise their experiences and beliefs as part of a government mandated system, which falls under Young’s definition of violence, “a form of oppression associated with the attitudes and practices that cultural imperialism sanctions” (Howe, p. 70). Rose (1989) laments the difficulties students have in a system that, for utilitarian purposes, requires them to be measured by instruments that indicate inconclusive, if not false, information about students who do not fit into the standard. Rose writes,
[W]hat you couldn’t represent with a ratio or a chart – what was messy and social and complex – was simply harder to talk about and much harder to get acknowledged … Numbers seduce us into thinking we know more than we do; they give the false assurance of rigor but reveal little about the complex cognitive and emotional processes behind the tally of errors and wrong answers. What goes on behind the mistakes simply escapes the measurers (Rose, 1989, p. 200).
It is this focus on quantitative data that has become pervasive in education in the United States, to the exclusion of the qualitative data that serves to more accurately define all of our students, not only those who are favored by the composition of the dominant system and the victims of the oppression both Howe and Young identify.
Given Howe’s position, the evidence is convincing that the current culture of standardized testing that exists is the United States as a result of ongoing attempts at education reform is yet another example that equality of educational opportunity does not exist in the public schooling system. Moreover, its mandate in light of the No Child Left Behind legislation initiated by the Bush administration and seeming continuation of the same testing policies by the Obama administration have and will continue to exacerbate inequality in education. Our students are pawns in what has become the commodification of education — a system that has resulted in the emergence of an education industry that is centered around the creation of skewed quantitative data, serving to benefit testing corporations, textbook companies, and for-profit tutoring companies. And the students who are most affected, the non-White, non-middle class, non-male other, continue to suffer the effects of unequal educational opportunity.
References
Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Second Edition. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Berliner, D.C. (2006). Our Impoverished View of Educational Research. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 949-995.
Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic Education: With a New Preface and Epilogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Howe, K. R. (1997). Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice, democracy, and schooling. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kozol, R. (1991). Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Murray, C. (2008). Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. New York, NY: Crown Forum.
Rose, M. (1989). The Politics of Remediation. In Lives on the Boundary (pp. 167-204). New York, NY: Penguin.
