Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History by William J. Reese (review)

While reading William J. Reese’s study of testing, you might find yourself repeatedly forgetting that he is writing about the nineteenth century and not the twenty-first. Reese describes the rise of standardized testing used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools that is at the center of much contemporary debate. He also demonstrates the long history of attaching high-stakes to tests and the way in which reformers have embraced testing, often with concerns about the performance of African-American students. As Reese amply illustrates, our national obsession with testing originated in the nineteenth century and shaped the development of public schools in the pre-Civil War era.

In fact, Reese convincingly pinpoints the exact moment of birth of standardized testing during a hot week in June 1845, in Boston. He tells the story of a plot hatched in secret by two school reformers—Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe—who developed the very first standardized, written exams for the students of that city in an attempt to show that schools were not performing as well as many thought. The two men worried that U.S. students were slipping behind their European peers and advocated many school reforms, including splitting students into separate grades, adopting uniform text books, professionally training teachers, hiring more (lower paid) women, reducing emphasis on corporal punishment, and appointing a superintendent to oversee instruction. These reforms undermined the authority of the master teachers, similar to today’s principals, who had gained considerable autonomy and power within the school system. Not surprisingly, these masters objected to proposed reforms, as did many of the town’s Democrats who disliked top down control and feared centralization of power, including the suggested creation of a state board of education.

Like some school reformers before them, Mann and Howe disdained the traditional system of exhibits, in which students performed for their parents and community to demonstrate their knowledge, and by extension, the quality of their teachers and schools. The public exhibitions were enormously popular, but frequently displayed only a few star pupils who recited texts from memory or answered questions posed to them. Reese notes that as early as 1803, a school committee in Salem, Massachusetts tried to draw a line between these exhibitions and examinations (the words then used interchangeably), summoning all students to the courthouse to sit for an exam. They had hoped to force students and teachers to work harder, but in what may have been the country’s very first “opt out” demonstration, the students refused to appear and nullified the exam experiment.

Reese spends several chapters digging into the back-story behind Mann and Howe’s secretly designed test. He carefully details all of the personalities, motivations, political connections, and public controversies that shaped the development of that first test. Reese helpfully connects this story to political, economic, and social developments in early America. For instance, he explains the rise of statistics as a new and trusted scientific form and the challenges that created for these early practitioners who lacked advanced statistical training. He also situates the story within abolitionist politics and religious trends, and points to the importance of newspapers and print culture that literally allowed student test scores to be front-page news.

Reese argues that, after causing a huge stir in Boston, that first standardized test reverberated around the nation, effectively becoming a turning point in the history of U.S. assessment: “After the summer of 1845, it was impossible to return fully to a time when impressions alone measured a school’s worth” (71). It was the first time that teachers’ jobs were linked to student test scores, providing the “high-stakes” in high-stakes-testing that are still contested today. Although written tests did not proliferate until after the Civil War and remained controversial, Reese marshals evidence from across the country to demonstrate that Boston let the genie out of the bottle. By the late nineteenth century he shows...