Intelligence 32 (2004) 539–540

Book review

Kill the messenger: the war on standardized testing

Richard P. Phelps. (2003). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ISBN 0-7658-0178-7. pp. xx+330

‘‘The faintest of all human passions,’’ wrote A. E. Housman (cited in Ricks, 1989, p.13), ‘‘is the love

of truth.’’ In the USA, host, hearth and home to the most advanced psychometric testing industry, war

rages between the proponents and opponents of standardised testing. All the checks and democratic

balances of the robust US Constitution are daily strained as first one side, then the other, seek or gain

some advantage over hearts and minds. Yet it seems a full and sufficient explanation of the complex

battle to say that opposition to testing is essentially a matter of vested interests protecting themselves

against demands for accountability.

This is an embattled book. Readers delighted, as I was, by the author’s earlier pamphlet, Why Testing

Experts Hate Testing (Phelps, 1999), will here find the themes greatly amplified. Incensed by the

partisan tactics of anti-testing groups, Phelps deliberately goes to great lengths to expound and analyse

the differing points of view, helped by scrupulous and scholarly documentation and a robustly empirical

approach. Fairness and impartiality, he reasons, will redound to his benefit, while the tactics of

suppression, smear and distortion will do his enemies no good at all. I was particularly impressed by

his own researches (Chapter 6) into media bias, exposing the capture of the liberal (illiberal) media yet

again, with whose anti-IQ mindset we are already drearily familiar. Even the supposedly anarchic

internet turns out to be as anarchic as the former Soviet Union, with tight ideological control of directory

listings by those hostile to standardised testing (pp. 168–176).

Much of the street-level fisticuffs is inevitably murky. To ‘‘You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it’’ we

can now oppose, ‘‘If you don’t like the temperature, break the thermometer.’’ But the former proposition

can be wonderfully verified: Phelps details beneficial outcomes on students’ abilities, ranging from

NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores in Texas and Canada to SATs in New York

State, as the effects of testing kick in (Chapter 7).

There is the perception that the USA education system is lousy with unnecessary tests that children

are forever sitting; but Phelps shows that US children are among the least tested in the world (Chapter 1).

Moreover it is clear to me, as an end-user in contact with American children, that standards in written

calculation skills have recovered greatly, to a level now above that in the UK, following the 1983 federal

report, A Nation at Risk, and much subsequent testing.

In 1987 Whole Language policies were officially mandated across the Golden State, as in Ontario and

Britain. Through a curriculum document, the English-Language Arts Framework, Whole Language

policies were implemented to a greater extent in California than any other state, according to the

federally-funded NAEP. Seven years later, in late 1994, the NAEP, applying national tests and criteria of

reading competence, found that Californian children were the least competent readers in the nation.

doi:10.1016/j.intell.2004.03.002

Book review540

Nearly 60% of fourth graders (9–10 year olds) read so poorly that they could not gain even a superficial

understanding of their school books. Even on Whole Language_inspired ‘tests’, the dimensions of the

disaster were clear: on the specially designed, ‘authentic’ California Learning Assessment System, 77%

of these same fourth graders obtained scores of 3 or below on a 6 point scale. The excuse of a relatively

high enrolment of minority pupils was inadequate: white students were the least competent readers of

their racial group in the US. Once again standardised testing provided the objective evidence that

revealed the dereliction. Marilyn Adams and others were drafted in, phonic literacy teaching was

mandated and Californian schools began to recover, though with a residue of unquantifiable cost in child

misery.

Perhaps Phelps need not worry. ‘‘About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to

think right,’’ wrote Samuel Johnson (1779–1781). The perception of vested interest is one that seems to

be unforgettable, as people congratulate themselves on seeing through the frantic attempts to bamboozle

them. The guardians of democracy may have proved supine, but commonsense continues to fortify the

apparently unquenchable preference of the general public for the information that tests give.

References

Johnson, S. (1779–1781). Lives of the English Poets: Essay on Addison.

Phelps, R. P. (1999). Why Testing Experts Hate Testing. Fordham Report, vol. 3, No. 1. Washington DC: Thomas B. Fordham

Foundation.

Ricks, C. (1989). Introduction to A. E. Housman. In C. Ricks (Ed.), Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Harmondsworth, UK:

Penguin.

Martin Turner

Brocksett Cottage, Kennel Lane, Windlesham,

Surrey GU20 6AA, UK

E-mail address: mvlturner@clara.co.uk

Tel.: +44-7967-487185

20 March 2004