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  • Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History by William J. Reese
  • Ben Keppel
Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History. By William J. Reese. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. 298pp. Cloth $36.00.

William J. Reese’s, Testing Wars in the Public Schools provides an urgently needed antidote to the ahistorical perspective which dominates current debates over the ways and means of providing universal public education in the United States. Because the American experiment with comprehensive universal education is indeed relatively new, it is quite easy to see twentieth- and twenty-first-century struggles over the equity of resources as standing alone in the “American Century” that reached its zenith during the Cold War. Reese reminds us that Americans, like the members of other political communities, have a history to reckon with and that the price of accepting the convenient option of just plowing ahead is to live in an unsatisfying present: the repetition of old arguments with no new intelligence to meet a genuinely diligent expenditure of passion and effort. Today, as in the past, parents, political leaders, and reformers of all stripes seek to remake education through a narrow definition of accountability firmly welded to a vast infrastructure of high-stakes testing. In the pursuit of easily demonstrated truths, the diversity of human learning and capacity is too easily set aside—too messy, too open-ended, [End Page 325] and ultimately, too expensive for some to pay in the assistance of others who are not their kin.

When historians return us to the age of Lincoln, they remind us that, back in those days, long-form oratory ruled the day. We are less likely to remember another truth: three-hour performances of rhetorical mastery did not mean that their intellectual content (even of the Lincoln-Douglas debates) was any more free of trash talk, bigotry, sound, and fury, all meant more to divert and distract than to challenge (nostalgic yearning aside, how many voters respond well to being disagreed with?). One of the great pleasures in Reese’s book is his painstaking reconstruction of education as part and parcel of this political culture. In this world, public emulation of classic forms was highly prized. Here, high-stakes testing was alive and well: a “weighing of [public] blunders and wonders” (29). The stress on student, teacher, and parent was great as many resources and rewards were tied to these few public displays of cultural reverence and competence. Like the testing regimes of later years, this form of evaluation and reward favored certain configurations of aptitude and personality over others, and, in this early experiment in public education, the form and appearance of learning came to be more important than accommodating the far more complex and lifelong process through which an individual appropriates knowledge by the individual, for the individual.

Although we have witnessed a genuine and continuing explosion of knowledge about the world, we have, Reese’s narrative rightly suggests, not made nearly as much progress toward finding public ways and institutional supports to encourage that last kind of educational journey. The standardized testing currently at the center of public debates, Reese confirms, originated in a meritocratic impulse—the desire to get beneath the showmanship encouraged by the more traditional reliance on public emulation and measure actual knowledge. In recounting a forgotten history of standardized testing, Reese is not looking to discredit such testing entirely, nor does he ignore the degree to which newer methods of teaching and assessment assisted many people in coming to terms with constantly changing technological requirements of earning a living. He focuses instead on the strong desire of both reformers and traditionalists to find ways to end necessary debates about matters in which we all have a stake.

One of the qualities I most admire about this book is the way in which ambition and humility are both present here. Reese provides an excellent model of cultural history that is both rich in research and strong in theoretical understanding. His account of institutional politics within the Boston school system, bringing together David Wallker’s Appeal (still a sadly underutilized [End Page 326] historical source) with the public and...

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