177 Matthew J. Hayden P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 1 1 Standardized Quantitative Learning Assessments and High Stakes Testing: Throwing Learning Down the Assessment Drain Matthew J. Hayden Teachers College, Columbia University The worldwide standardization of education is well underway and includes institutional structures, teacher training, curriculum development, and more impor- tantly, specifically delineated outcomes of schooling and the assessments that measure them. I contend that the core of the standardized testing movement has a narrow, limited, and inaccurate working definition of learning and has accepted wholesale the assumptions inherent in statistical quantitative learning assessments (SQLA) outcome measurement, which make them unsuitable for use in high stakes testing (HST). I use Gert Biesta’s work on evidence-based learning to frame my analysis of SQLA by thinking with Hans-Georg Gadamer about prejudice, fore- knowledge, and interpretation to better understand these problems. I then examine how the methods used to analyze SQLA actually end up determining what “learn- ing” is, and how using them in the context of HST may actually decrease learning even if scores increase. “QUALITY” AND “ACCOUNTABILITY” There has been much recent handwringing over the alleged “failure” of United States’ schools, partly based on the average standardized test scores of U.S. students as compared to the average scores of students from around the world on the same or similar tests. One result has been increased, and abstract, demands for “quality” and “accountability” in schooling, that find some specificity in scientific and technologi- cal concepts from industry and a market-based paradigm wherein quality is deter- mined by the satisfaction of the “customers” or “consumers.” 1 Such a conception begs the question (Who are the customers? Students, parents, or the general public?) and easily leads to education becoming merely the delivery of goods (that is, grades and test scores) and services wherein the teacher is a “server” and operates at the customer’s behest. The arguments about accountability are similarly vague and seem to imply teachers, administrators, and schools, but what about students, parents, and society? The market-based paradigm supported by the language of SQLA is not going to hold the “customer” accountable; the customer is always right. Thus the “service” is held accountable, focusing on instrumental accountability that has as its object instrumental education, not “rich” knowledge or competencies. 2 “Accountability” also finds comfort in its linguistic brethren accounting and the quantitative and numerical values of accountancy, betraying a cultish faith in quantitative analysis to support vague determinations of quality. This market-based paradigm and the “evidence” it produces ignores the historical and intellectual prejudices embedded in the practices of statistical analyses that constrict and restrict the parameters of inquiry, substantially predetermine outcomes, and limit what can be known from the results. 3 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 2011      Robert Kunzman, editor © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society      Urbana, Illinois