EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 45: 90–94, 2009

Copyright

C American Educational Studies Association
ISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 online
DOI: 10.1080/00131940802546910

High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real
Crisis in Education. David Hursh. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
175. $70.00; $24.95
Reviewed by Brian D. Barrett, State University of New York, Cortland, and Rob
Moore, University of Cambridge

With High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real
Crisis in Education, David Hursh has produced a work that is highly pertinent to
the current condition of education in the U.S.A. and beyond—especially in other
Anglophone nations where forms of the neoliberalism that he critiques have also
taken strong roots. This work is committed to a strong view of education as serving
the public good and enhancing the human possibilities of students as learners. It is
on the basis of this commitment that he develops an informed, systematic critique
of the now dominant neoliberal model with its narrow preoccupation with testing,
market (as opposed to democratic) accountability, and quantifiable outcomes.
Because his position is so well-informed, readers will find this a useful book,
as well as possibly an inspiring one. It not only informs; it also illustrates the
condition it addresses by presenting examples from the level of policy through to
the classroom. Hursh’s approach is informed by three main, interweaving, sources
of information. First, there is his own experience in education, as someone from
a working class background. Second, there is his experience as a teacher. Finally,
there is the long tradition of American progressive education that has its roots
in John Dewey. Hursh’s account is refreshing in that it draws upon personal
experience and upon theory in a way that is not overcomplicated by excessive
intellectual verbiage or overelaborate discussions of themes such as reflexivity or
identity. Many teachers and educational researchers will be able to identify directly
with his message and the sources that inform it and this book effectively articulates
the concerns of educators in the liberal tradition that Hursh represents.
In chapter one, Hursh states clearly that the real crisis in education has its roots
in the rise of neoliberalism and two largely concurrent movements in education
(and, indeed, in neoliberal society): a push for standards and accountability, based
in large part on high-stakes standardized testing, coupled with marketization and
privatization. As opposed to the crisis “manufactured” (Berliner and Biddle 1995)
by neoliberals, which blames educational progressivism and social democracy
for fostering levels of educational inequality that are unacceptable in the face
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of increasing global economic competition, Hursh details how the real crisis has
exacerbated these inequalities (and other problems, such as global warming) and
impacts the ability of students to make sense of the world around them. This
last point, of course, is certainly not an unintended consequence of the neoliberal
movement in education, where a focus on preparing students for their place in the
economy is elevated far above a focus on preparing them to be socially responsible
democratic citizens and where the individualization of success and failure on high-
stakes standardized examinations draws attention away from the fact that this is,
to a large extent, socially structured. Students are not the only ones who may be
becoming less likely to critically consider the effects of neoliberal policy shifts
as, with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), teacher education and the
requirements placed on teacher trainees have themselves come to be shaped by
the demands of standards and accountability. This has the potential to lead to the
teaching of narrow, often scripted, curricula and makes it less likely that teachers
will ask not only the pedagogical, but also the philosophical, sociological, and
political questions that shaped Hursh’s own development as a teacher in a different
era (8).
These issues are picked up in chapter 2. Here, Hursh draws on Bourdieu’s
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) concepts of social and cultural capital. Mismatches
between working-class and poor students’ social and cultural capital and the social
and cultural capital of educational institutions and their representatives often serve
to undermine the academic success of these students. Meanwhile, the similarities
between the social and cultural capital of middle-class students and that of ed-
ucational institutions and representatives serves to make their academic success
natural, appearing objective, deserved, and fair, rather than the arbitrary result of
such complementarities of symbolic capital. Hursh details how, as a working-class
student in high school and college, his attainment of the social and cultural cap-
ital of the middle-class (resulting from his networking efforts and advantageous
placements in his schools’ tracking systems) demystified education, fostering both
access and success. This attainment had the (for the dominant classes, perhaps
unintended) consequence of encouraging Hursh’s own social critique. In doing
so, he comes, in the sociological sense, to make personal troubles public is-
sues (Lemert 1997), recognizing the social and political constraints facing him
and aiming to reach beyond them. For Hursh, education reform is one crucial
avenue for this and he begins to detail his efforts here in designing schools to
prepare critically-thinking and reflexive citizens. Teachers are encouraged to rec-
ognize that educational goals and processes are political and contested, rather than
inherently neutral and objective and, therefore, that they have a critical role to
play in shaping these goals and processes. They must not cede control to those
outside the education system, and they must establish education as a site not for
the preparation of workers and the preservation of the social order, but for critical
thinking that transforms it. This involves questioning, as Hursh does, the nature
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of subjects in the curriculum, the continuity of learning, and the role of student
choice and teacher authority.
In chapter 3, Hursh details a number of realizations that accompanied his
investigation of these questions. These realizations include the idea that education
reform that is critical and progressive does not mean that teachers should avoid
drawing on their authority on subject matter and that individualized instruction
does not entail students individually determining what to learn and how to learn
it, especially when this means that they often choose to learn alone, rather than
with and from one another. However, it is also recognized that recent trends in
education reform towards entrepreneurialism, high-stakes standardized testing and
accountability have undermined the contribution that schools can and should make
to democratic practices and social equality as demonstrated by Hursh in recounting
his own teaching experience in alternative, democratic schools.
The historical and political context of these competing visions of the purposes of
teaching and learning are addressed in chapter 4. This chapter explains why high-
stakes testing and accountability have been implemented so widely and exclusively
largely in terms of the rise of neoliberal social and educational policy. Hursh
reminds readers again, however, that this is contested terrain. He references the
likes of John Dewey and George Counts who argued that, to “remake the world”
(Counts 1932, 261–262), education must serve the needs of the public rather
than of corporations. Indeed, Hursh notes how, in the wake of World War II,
Brown vs. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and social democratic
reform, the achievement gap between White students and their Black and Hispanic
counterparts narrowed before widening again with the onset of the standards
and accountability era (signaled by A Nation at Risk, National Commission on
Excellence in Education 1983, and an aftermath characterized by the resegregation
of public schools) ostensibly aiming to leave no child behind.
Hursh examines, specifically, the role that high-stakes testing at the state and
federal levels plays in leaving no child behind (or not) in chapter 5. The extensive
involvement of state and federal government in education is a relatively new
phenomenon in the United States, dating to the 1980s when states such as New
York, Texas, and Florida began mandating passing scores on high school exit
examinations as a requirement for high school graduation. These examinations
serve to usher in a shift in control over educational decisions from students,
families, and teachers to policymakers and bureaucrats and also result in de facto
state curricula as classroom teachers attempt to cover material they know will be
tested.
Ultimately, then, those advocating education for economic survival appear to
have won the day, cleverly couching their arguments with claims that standards
and accountability promote educational equality and objectivity. However, Hursh
demonstrates that neither of these outcomes has materialized. Rather, American
education is currently characterized by a widening achievement gap between
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 93

White students and their Black and Hispanic counterparts, declining graduation
rates (particularly among students of color, low-income students, English language
learners, and students with disabilities), and dubious test results (suggesting poor
construction, educational triage and the political manipulation of cut scores) as
the government seeks to hold its citizens accountable rather than the other way
around (95).
Chapter 6 more concretely lays out how the effects of the practice of neoliber-
alism, as opposed to its promises of equality and efficiency, combine to make the
city of Chicago and its education system increasingly economically, racially, and
spatially segregated. Despite assertions of freedom, choice and liberty, neoliberal
policy in Chicago is demonstrated to lead to increasing control of wealth and space
by dominant social classes at the expense of the city’s most marginalized citizens
and, indeed, at the expense of democracy. However, these policies are not unop-
posed and Hursh (with chapter coauthor Pauline Lipman) suggests that education
may increasingly become a focus of democratic social struggle. Such resistance,
importantly, encourages alliances across communities and social sectors that have
not previously worked together, alliances that bridge racial and class differences,
geographic distances, and that involve professionals, unions, and grassroots ac-
tivists who oppose school closings and the erosion of local control of schools,
which has increasingly been handed over to corporate interests.
With this resistance in mind, Hursh closes the book with a chapter detailing
alternatives to neoliberalism and high-stakes testing. These alternatives can sup-
port the common good, rather than the individualistic tendencies promoted by
neoliberalism. In doing so, Hursh suggests that teachers first work to resist claims
that neoliberalism is, inevitably, the only and best response to globalization, and
work together to combat neoliberal policy and its inequitable effects on schools
and society. This work, which Hursh notes may be made easier as public senti-
ment turns against NCLB and the inequality it fosters, includes varied forms of
authentic assessment, increased and equitable (through positive discrimination)
funding to schools, collaborative and interdisciplinary work, and reduced school
and class size.
As mentioned, one of the book’s main strengths is its original approach, weaving
autobiography, theory, and research-based evidence. This ties into another strength
of the book. At a time when progressive or critical perspectives are largely silenced
or marginalized (perhaps even through the distribution of research funding tied to
NCLB), fly under the radar of the current economically instrumental standards and
accountability-based educational discourse of the day, or are couched in the less
accessible postmodern discourse of critical educationalists, which can be less suc-
cessful in connecting issues of culture, knowledge, policy and pedagogy, Hursh’s
account offers concrete examples of the types of democratic schooling that are
both threatened by and offer alternatives to these discourses. Paradoxically, what
might be viewed as a weakness of the book, we find as one of its strengths. Despite
94 BOOK REVIEWS

the concrete examples mentioned above, and although Hursh (rightfully) critiques
some forms of progressive education as too permissive and lacking a strong sense
of what knowledge should be taught, his theoretical conceptualization of what
democratic schooling actually means and of the place of reflexivity for teachers
within it could be conceived of as underdeveloped. However, what we are left
with throughout the work is an exceptionally clear example of reflexivity through
personal narrative (i.e., “these are the questions is posed to myself as I entered
the teaching profession, these are questions I ask now, and this is how I have
gone about and continue to go about trying to answer them in my classrooms
and lifetime”) that is more refreshing and carries more value to practicing edu-
cators than would any form of over-theorized pontification. Ultimately, it is these
characteristics that make this an important book for those interested in reading,
thinking, and learning about the education system; its relationship to society; and
its prospects for the future. Most important, however, this is an important book
for those working in the field of education, for they stand at the forefront of truly
democratic and equitable reform in modern schools and it is they who might be
most compelled to reflect upon their own practice and commitments, as Hursh
does his, and to work to change the world around them.

REFERENCES

Berliner, David C., and Bruce J. Biddle. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack
on America’s Public Schools. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean Claude. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture.
London: Sage.
Counts, George S. 1932. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York: John Day.
Lemert, Charles. 1997. Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. 1983. A Nation at Risk: A Report to the Nation and
the Secretary of Education. Washington, DC: US Department of Education.