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The Effects of Assessment: a Reflection from within 
the Economic Worldview in Education 

Olivier Michaud

 

In a seminar held in my university last fall on education policy research, I was, like many of my colleagues, as-
tonished at the dominance of the economic worldview in the shaping of American education.1 The question 

of what good education is was surprisingly absent from the book used in the seminar: Handbook of Education 
Policy Research (Sykes, Barbara, & Plank, 2009). The majority of the authors of this book were more interested 
in how we could make the educational system more efficient. More to the point, they were interested in how 
efficiency can be measured. This is why the main methodology used by the researchers was quantitative. Indeed, 
the assumption is that only quantitative methods allow for a more accurate judgment of reality at large, in this 
case the educational system, and show possible links between causes and effects.

  
The circle is complete: the economic worldview dominates the discussion on all aspects of policy research. 

The economic worldview in education gives us, as its main advice, to treat the educational system with the medi-
cine of the market. We have to make the educational system efficient through the use of the business model. 
The prerequisite of this model is a simple outcome, because only a simple outcome can be measured or assessed 
clearly. Finally, we evaluate the model through the logic of the model, i.e., the predominance of quantitative 
methods. Everything is now understood through the lens of quantity and numbers.

I don’t know for what reason my colleagues and I were surprised by the dominance of the economic world-
view in education policy research. Aren’t we already aware that this discourse is shaping most of the public 
sphere and, by extension, invading even the private sphere? Bourdieu states it in a simple way: “everywhere we 
hear it said, all day long—and this is what gives the dominant discourse its strength—that there is nothing to put 
forward in opposition to the neo-liberal view, that it has succeeded in presenting itself as self-evident, that there 
is no alternative” (cited in Hursh, 2001, p. 3). There is no reason why the same logic that is taking over the pub-
lic domain will stop in face of the sacred role of education in our democracies. According to Milton Friedman, 
father of all the theories that aim at reshaping education through economy (Belfield & Levin, 2009, p. 516; 
Carnoy, 2009, p. 31; Witte, 2009), education is not a different good than other goods, there is no essential dif-
ference between food and education: “The role of the government, in market-education, says Friedman, would 
be limited to insuring that schools met certain minimum standards, such as inclusion of minimum common 
content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to insure that they maintain minimum sanitary 
standards” (quote of 1962 cited in Witte, 2009, p. 491).

Therefore, the invasion of higher education by issues of assessment and measurement has to be put in a 
larger perspective. First, we have to recognize that higher education is poised to succomb to the same economic 
logic that has taken over virtually every other dimension of education. Second, much of what determines educa-
tion policy is largely a response to the market ideology that shapes the public domain. The goal of this article is 
to offer a rationale against this dominant economic model by analyzing one aspect of it: high stakes testing. Ac-
cording to Jenlink and Austin (2004), “the standards movement now dominates discussions about all aspects of 
education – teaching and learning, curriculum, and assessment – as well as all aspects of educator preparation” 
(p. 3). Consequently, the choice to look more closely into high stakes testing, rather than some other feature, is 
not a trivial one, but speaks to the core elements of the economic ideology in education.  Rather than see this 



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situation as hopeless, I aim to show, through several qualitative studies on K-12 education, that we can use this 
type of economic logic against itself. But before we do that, let’s review a short history of the economic worldview 
in education. 

A short history and presentation of the economic worldview in education

The educational situation in which we encounter ourselves today did not pop up accidentally in recent years; 
on the contrary, it has a long history. As said earlier, the theoretical roots of this movement at least go back to 
Milton Friedman in the sixties. However, it is with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 that economic 
educational theory took a new direction that became predominant in the shaping of American education. Ac-
cording  to Cuban (1998), all the changes in educational policy in the United States since the publication of 
A Nation at Risk have been superficial, since all the politicians of the different parties and policymakers have 
adhered to the main principles of this work (p. 463). If there has been a change in the actors and the names of 
educational reforms, there has been no change in the basic principles. This trend continues up to the present: 
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the continuation and the intensification of the changes proposed in A Nation at 
Risk (Olsen & Sexton, 2009, p. 9; Shoen & Fusarelli, 2008, p. 190). 

 
The development of the economic view in education is based on the idea that the American schooling system 

is failing children and American society. First, the educational system does not prepare the American workforce 
for the global economy. Second, it is failing because scores on various tests have not improved in the last decades 
even if the investment per student has increased significantly. The educational economists took a diagnostic of 
why the American schooling system has been failing. On one hand, it is failing because the laws of the market 
are inexistent in education.  As a consequence, an important part of the solution to reform the failing system is 
to apply the laws of the market to education, which means improving competitiveness. This is the basis of what 
is called “public choice” in education (West, 2009). Charter schools  and voucher programs (Belfield & Levin, 
2009; Vergari, 2009; Witte, 2009) are some of the direct effects of a policy that aims to create competition and 
choice in the American educational system. The creation of competition inside American schooling is twofold: 
first, it facilitates the creation of private schools and, second, it creates competition inside the public system 
(Hess, 2009). 

On the other hand, the economic view in education also affirms that the American educational system can 
be managed as a business. The central concept of this theory lies in the idea of “accountability.”  People working 
for the government have to be accountable to it. This is why the second concept that follows from the business 
model is that of “standards.”  People can only be accountable if they know what they are accountable for: this is 
the role of standards. Educational standards represent what the student is expected to learn at any given stage of 
education as well as how the student should progress through the education system. 

“The market-oriented education” is the belief that fair competition inside the American schooling system 
will result in a better education for all and, ultimately, a better society. Indeed, this improvement of the educa-
tional system is necessary to establish fair competition among individuals. The democratic ideal that sustains 
this vision is the one that we usually refer to as the “American Dream” (Beach, 2007): there is natural inequality 
between people, but this can only be fully appreciated and assessed from the standpoint of fair competition.  All 
individuals need some common standpoint or measure from the beginning of the competition, which ensures 
it is a fair competition.  The idea is that a good education is something all require in a democratic meritocracy. 
Furthermore, the public good will be naturally enhanced from the competition of all: everyone can share the 
burden of any democratic inequalities. 

I want to focus my attention on a particular aspect of the economic worldview in education, an aspect that 
is logically and naturally related to “accountability” and “standards,” namely, “high-stake testing.”  Testing is the 
tool that policy makers and politicians use to verify if educational actors (administrators of all levels, teachers 
and students) have attained the standards that were assigned to them. “Test scores were favoured partly because 



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they were the most readily available measure of school outcomes” (Carnoy, 2009, p. 31). Without testing there is 
no accountability, because this is the most effective way to verify that standards are reached. Moreover, to make 
accountability real there must be consequences attached to the people that do or do not achieve the goals given 
to them. Depending on whether the standards are attained or not, there can be rewards or sanctions. A reward, 
for example, could be that certain teachers receive monetary bonuses, or that students receive a diploma, or 
that administrators receive public praise in seeing their school labelled as “successful.” The sanctions are more 
diverse: students jeopardize their chances to graduate, schools are publicly labelled as “failing” and, in some 
extreme cases, even closed and restructured. 

High-stakes testing performs various functions for those who advocate its use. First, as representing common 
standards, they give a reference point to all educational actors of what has to be achieved. Second, they can give 
a description and evaluation of the education situation for not only policy makers and politicians, but also for 
teachers and administrators of a school and district. They can also provide data that can be used to inform peo-
ple about a given educational situation, which allows for future actions to be taken and the potential success of 
these actions assessed. Third, because the testing is related to positive and negative consequences, it is supposed 
to motivate actors to attain the goals assigned to them (Herman & Baker, 2009, p. 179). 

My next goal is to show the negative consequences of the widespread policy of high-stakes testing in educa-
tion, referring to some recent qualitative studies that directly tackle this issue. My assumption is that most of 
the problems and criticisms with high-stakes testing at K-12 education also hold for higher education in general 
insofar as both buy into the same market ideology. 

Perverse effects of high stakes testing   

Teaching to the test

One of the collateral effects often attributed to high-stakes testing is that curriculum is narrowed, which al-
lows for teachers to teach to what the test assesses, therefore, narrowing significantly the education of children. 
This phenomenon is usually referred to as “teaching to the test” (Herman & Baker, 2009, p. 182). Mcneil, Cop-
pola, Radigan and Heilig (2008) report in their research that teaching has been significantly affected by testing. 
Teachers limit the curriculum to what will be assessed in the test. There is also an effect on the pedagogy used 
inside the classroom, increasing the use of drills to make the students learn the knowledge and skills they need 
to pass the test. 

Narrowing the curriculum affects at risk students more than those in little danger of failing the test (McSpad-
den McNeil, Coppola, Radigan, & Vasquez Heilig, 2008, p. 28). The former lose their elective classes in order 
to focus on math and English (Sipple, Killeen, & Monk, 2004, p. 154). For the same reason, other schools may 
ask their at risk students to stay after school (Seachore Louis, Febey, & Schroeder, 2005, p. 193).

“Teaching to the test” also narrows what it means to be educated. Students will have to memorize a large 
amount of knowledge without seeing the usefulness of what they learn. Learning then becomes  disconnected 
from student lives (Rigsby & DeMulder, 2003, pp. 19-20). Lipman (2003) argues that, thanks to this process, at 
risk students learn obedience and powerlessness; the students are not recognized as agents of their learning but 
as passive actors that need to be filled with information and skills. 

This vision of how learning is degraded through “teaching to the test” is largely voiced by teachers. They 
feel that education becomes not only meaningless for the students, but also for themselves as teachers (Rigsby 
& DeMulder, 2003, p. 17). For most teachers, teaching involves much more than “teaching to the test,” but is a 
passion that has to be shared with the students. Students do not learn to read just for the sake of reading, they 
must learn to read texts that are meaningful (Gerstl-Pepin, 2006, p. 153).

 



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A variety of different studies report that teachers feel high-stakes testing is attacking their professionalism, 
limiting their autonomy as a teacher (e.g. Seachore Louis, Febey, & Schroeder, 2005, p. 184).  What is more, the 
problem is far more serious for those teachers who have students at risk of failing tests (Lipman, 2003, p. 337). 
Teachers find it difficult to teach something that they believe is important and educational but yet is not explic-
itly required for test preparation (Mabry & Margolis, 2006, p. 12). The consequence is that teachers are losing 
their sense of agency in the educational process.

Some teachers conclude that they are no longer educators or teachers but, rather, technicians (Rigsby & De-
Mulder, 2003, p. 17). They do not have to think, but rather apply mechanically what others have thought. This is 
well expressed in the following quote from a teacher: “It makes me feel, like, then, you don’t really need trained 
teachers; you just need trained monkeys” (cited in Olsen & Sexton, 2009, p. 23).  As is evident, such testing poli-
cies clearly impact the morale of teachers, in which they feel unrecognized as professionals while being forced to 
do things they do not believe in.  It undermines other essential dimensions of teaching as well, such as reflectivity 
and compassion (Gerstl-Pepin, 2006; Rigsby & DeMulder, 2003).  For example, some teachers report that they 
are thinking about quitting the profession because of the climate created by high-stakes testing.  

Quite often high-stakes testing only compounds the anxiety and pressure felt by participants.  Students fail 
the tests because they are under stress. Teachers and administrators at schools that are “high risk” usually feel 
more pressure. Moreover, the pressure is higher when teachers and administrates believe there is no way to reach 
the objectives proposed to them, especially with the limited resources often available (Mabry & Margolis, 2006, 
p. 155; Sipple, Killeen, & Monk, 2004). Pressure comes not only from all levels of administration, but also from 
the public, since schools labelled as “failing” are publicly shamed.  Even schools that perform well are under 
constant pressure, as they want to keep their status of successful schools (Seachore Louis, Febey, & Schroeder, 
2005, pp. 183, 186). 

Equity
 
One of the goals of high-stakes testing is efficiency.  This is seen as a tool to make sure that the goals settled 

by policymakers and politicians are attained.  However, there is another goal behind this policy as important as 
that of efficiency, namely, social justice or equity. The very name ‘No Child Left Behind’ points out that goal. “The 
catch-phrase, ‘no child left behind,’ refers to federal efforts to remedy persistent gaps in student achievement re-
sults in comparison among majority student performance and groups of minority, low-income, English language 
learners, and students with disabilities” (Lindle, 2009, p. 319). NCLB aims to remedy the various achievement 
gaps in education among students of different groups by offering an education of quality to all.  Seen as such, 
it is the continuation of the democratic ideal where the success of an individual in school – and therefore in 
society – is not determined by his or her cultural and economic background. 

 
A lot of studies put in doubt the notion that the policy of high-stakes testing narrows achievement gaps. 

Diamond (2007) concludes that such testing is ineffective as a means to narrow achievement gaps. This is also a 
finding of Seashore Louis, Febey and Schroeder (2005) in which they note that in one of the three schools they 
studied: “Almost all teachers mentioned that poor, immigrant students’ needs were given inadequate considera-
tion by state-level policymakers representing suburban and rural interests” (p. 192). The results of many studies 
corroborate the conclusion that high-stakes testing is not helping the communities that most need it. 

Other researchers are far more radical in their estimation and affirm that high-stakes testing is increasing the 
very achievement gaps they were supposed to remediate (Lipman, 2003; McSpadden McNeil, Coppola, Radi-
gan, & Vasquez Heilig, 2008). Lipman (2003) concludes that the Latino and Black communities in low income 
neighbourhoods are more at risk of being victims of the “teaching for the test” style of pedagogy.  A school in a 
white middle class community can avoid this, since they are not in danger of failing the test (p. 338). For Lipman, 
that situation prevents Latino and Black youths from low income communities from receiving an education that 
aims to teach them the higher critical thinking skills that could help them to resolve real life problems. Lipman 



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claims that not only is high-stakes testing not resolving the achievement gaps, but that it is actually increasing 
them, preventing youth from learning those very skills needed to transform their situation. 

McSpadden McNeil, Coppola, Radigan and Vasquez Heilig (2008) arrive at the same conclusion, bringing to 
light another hidden side-effect of high-stakes testing. They studied a high school in a high-poverty urban district 
of Texas and brought to light how this school improved their test score results by keeping at risk students from 
graduating into tenth grade. By keeping those students in ninth grade, they prevented them from taking the 
national test, which is given in tenth grade. The school could do this by using a waiver administered by the state 
education agency that permits schools to apply for special rules for graduation to some students. “It was a waiver 
from the traditional method of basing grade promotion on the number of accrued credits; a school under this 
waiver could base grade promotion on different criteria, such as having to pass four courses rather than gaining 
credits” (p. 21). The final consequence of this strategy was that a lot of students were just dropping out of school 
instead of repeating a year. The authors of the study argue that the decision to drop out of school is not the result 
of one cause, but the convergence of many, such as: students were repeating a year, students were identified as 
those who will underachieve in the state test, students report the experience of school as meaningless, useless 
and boring, and that the curriculum/pedagogy of their courses were completely shaped by the test. 

This strategy of the administrators and teachers of Edgeview, the school studied by McSpadden McNeil, Cop-
pola, Radigan and Vasquez Heilig (2008), is directly linked to the Texan policy of high-stakes testing. The previ-
ous principal of the school had been fired for lack of results, even though he had improved the test scores from 
15 to 20 % (p. 20). The teachers of Edgeview had, for their part, to live with the public shame of being a failing 
school and facing the danger of being closed. The stakes were clear for the administrators and for the teachers 
of Edgeview School. Administrators and teachers saw, in the waiver, the most efficient way to improve their test 
scores. Moreover, they knew that other schools in the district were improving their scores through the waiver. 

The administrators and the teachers were morally divided. On the one hand, they knew it was bad for the 
students. On the other hand, they had to avoid the negative consequences, such as, losing their jobs and being 
labelled a failing school. “Ethically, I think it [the waiver] is wrong. But if I’m going to lose my job if my scores 
don’t go up, do I roll over and forget it?” (the principal of Edgeview high school, cited p. 21).

By using the waiver strategy the school was able to earn the title “recognized with exemplary progress” (p. 22). 
“This jump [in the test scores] earned the school its exemplary progress rating on the district’s accountability 
matrix and another star on the marquee in the front of the school for becoming a Recognized school.” This ex-
ample clearly shows that positive consequences and recognition can be won at a considerable expense, namely, 
the loss of many students from the schooling system. This loss did not appear in the official number of Edgeview 
dropouts in 2002, which was reported at zero. 

 
It is because of problems like the one outlined above that some authors affirm that the social justice discourse 

in education is false and misleading. Indeed, the rhetoric of NCLB is so closely focused on teachers and admin-
istrators in accounting for achievement gaps that deeper social inequalities are easy to miss.  Thus, the inequality 
that pervades many a school is never put in the larger context of the structural inequality of our society. There is 
an economic gap at the root of the educational achievement gap that is shadowed by the rhetoric on educational 
accountability. (Anderson, 2001, p. 324; Gerstl-Pepin, 2006, p. 143; Lipman, 2003, p. 344).    

The validity problem
 
Various authors put in question the validity of the tests. “Validity is thus a matter of accumulating and 

integrating evidence that demonstrates the extent to which inferences drawn from an assessment’s results are 
justified for particular uses or purposes” (Herman & Baker, 2009, p. 180). The general claim against high-stakes 
testing is that they are not valid because they are not giving an accurate representation of student learning. There-
fore, the studies reviewed do not put in question the reliability and the consistency of tests, but they put in doubt 



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that those tests achieve what they are made for: an accurate representation of the knowledge and the learning 
of a child at a precise moment. “Reliability and accuracy are necessary but not sufficient prerequisites for valid 
assessment” (Herman & Baker, 2009, p. 180).

 
At the root of the critiques against the validity of high-stakes testing is the issue and tension between uni-

formity and particularity. The tests are constructed on the frame of a “one-size-fits all standard” (Lipman p. 343). 
However, students are not all at the same place at the same moment. 

The nature of our education system is such that we are attempting to artificially civilize the whole spectrum 
of the population, including those who enter school with major disparities, to a common level. It is a race to the 
top of the hill that was chosen by the ruling powers to be the goal of all children. The problem is that there are 
unforeseen handicaps in the race. Some children have to carry heavy baggage. Some children have been coached 
in racing tactics. Some children were unable to read the racing instructions. Yet all children are assumed to be 
equally able to race (teacher quoted in Rigsby & DeMulder, 2003, p. 17)

Testing is based on an ideal situation where all students would be at the same place at the moment of the 
test. As stated earlier, one of the goals of a democratic education is to create a situation where all the individuals 
could engage in a fair competition, fair because they all start at the same point. However, as this teacher tells us, 
high-stakes testing is not fostering such a situation; rather, it is fostering the same kind of inequalities. What was 
supposed to be part of the solution is in fact now part of the problem.  

Moreover, testing does not take into consideration the fact that all children are fundamentally different. 
Testing makes sense from the view of the policymakers: all students are data, they have no particularities and 
individualities, they all share common formal characteristics, they are all abstractly similar and interchangeable. 
The teacher has a completely different view. For him, students are not abstract entities, but concrete individuals 
with whom he is living every day. He knows the specificities of all his students and will adapt to them. In other 
words, his teaching and evaluation are informed by his knowledge of the differences between the students of 
his class. “We are teaching a child. You take out that human piece at the times when you just look at the data” 
(quote of a principal in Mabry & Margolis, 2006, p. 19). “They [the staff of the school] also shared their school’s 
ongoing struggles to improve amid the reductionism of their school districts, which tended to treat all schools, 
teachers, and students as the same” (Craig, 2009, p. 125). 

 
The second aspect of the critique of testing validity arises from the issue of time. Tests are temporally situated 

at a precise moment. They are a snap shot of the learning of the child at a particular time. Testing has therefore 
not the temporal vision of the teacher, a vision of the progress of the child through time. A teacher evaluates 
the child by taking in consideration the progress he made during the class. In Mabry and Margolis (2006), a 
principal affirms that he relies more on the teachers to know the state and progress of student learning than test 
scores (p. 25). As Cuban (1998) points out, policy makers and researchers have different criteria to judge the 
validity of an educational policy, and, more fundamentally, of what it means to educate someone and how we 
can measure such education.  

Finally, there is the belief across several studies that tests are not valid because they are not constructed to 
evaluate the learning of the child. As said in a previous section, testing can lead in some places to a narrowing 
of the curriculum and of teacher pedagogy – what we usually refer as “teaching to the test.”  When that happens 
education comes to have a very limited meaning: a teacher educates when he makes the students learn the skills 
and the knowledge necessary for the test; a student is educated when he has the skills and the knowledge to pass 
the test or when he has passed the test. Here is how a teacher describes her experience of “teaching to the test”: “I 
presented the information to my students in a way in which I was not comfortable: read, recite, review, MEMO-
RIZE. I knew the majority of my students would retain little, if any, of it. However, I got caught up in the testing 
mania” (quoted in Rigsby & DeMulder, 2003, p. 19, majuscules originals). In such cases, testing becomes its 
own goal: being educated means being able to pass the test. Education no longer means equipping the child with 



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skills and knowledge that are relevant for his life and that will help him to transform his reality. The teacher says 
in the last quote that even memorization may be of little use, because she expects that the students will forget 
all that they learned through drills. Moreover, this approach prevents the learning of other thinking aptitudes, 
such as critical thinking, that are obviously more important in today’s world. If we understand education as a 
more complex phenomenon than only memorization, we have to conclude that much standardized testing in its 
current forms is not very valuable, as it does not represent and evaluate the learning of the child. 

Mabry and Margolis (2006) conclude their study by saying that official test scores, even where they are posi-
tive, may not give an appropriate image of the real situation of the schools. “Test data indicating that the two 
participating schools were meeting state and federal achievement targets suggested successful policy implemen-
tation. However, the fuller picture of implementation provided by classroom observations and interviews of 
personnel was much less clear about whether local implementation of NCLB had been successful” (p. 26). 

The role of the scholar in this debate

How to reflect in the era of economic logic

I think it is inevitable that the assessment logic that has so dramatically affected the K-12 American edu-
cational system will proceed along similar lines in the field of higher education.  There may have been a time, 
a golden age, where the university was seen as an institution that had to be separate from other social institu-
tions, as a place that dedicated itself to the search for truth, a place of higher learning free from the mercantile 
passions that dominate society (Bloom, 1987). If such a time really existed, it is now far beyond us. We should 
therefore not see our role as university scholars as disconnected from the other levels of the educational system. 
The question is what should be our role in this debate?  

I believe that the battle with the economic logic in education is ultimately ideological: between what we 
think are the goals of education, of what is the role of teachers, on how we can assess learning, on how and if 
we should help children in difficulty, in what kind of society we wish to live in, and, ultimately, what kind of de-
mocracy we want. However, providing alternatives alone does not end our intellectual work. To be successful we 
need to use the logic of the economic worldview against itself. First, we must continue to do the kind of research 
that was presented in the previous sections. This means going into the field and showing the real consequences 
of such economic policies in education, as well as looking at examples of people who have successfully struggled 
against them. As shown earlier, the policy of high-stakes testing is one of the most important dimensions of the 
economic worldview that permeates education, and so showing the failure of this approach is one of the best 
ways of showing the limitations with the economic approach to education. It is now clearly documented that 
the policy of high-stakes testing is ineffective at aiding those students that the policy was originally designed to 
help. Indeed, high stakes testing is not narrowing the achievement gap but increasing it. It is the students of 
low income communities or from specific minority groups that are the biggest targets of  “teaching for the test,” 
and who end up with not only lower test scores, but also impoverished curriculums that do not prepare them 
for any real life problems. 

We have to advance the notion that high stakes testing is not, in its current use, improving the quality of 
education. Such an approach to testing is not valid, because it does not give a valid measure of children’s learn-
ing. The meaning of “being educated”  ends up terribly impoverished under these assessment methods. The 
ultimate goal of high-stakes testing was to improve schooling. We can show in various ways that it is working 
against this goal: learning cannot mean memorizing facts, and teaching cannot be defined only by the use of 
drills to prepare pupils for tests. Policy makers and politicians should be sensitive to such arguments, as it makes 
good use of the vernacular they are most comfortable with, that of numerical data.  



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How to improve high stakes testing

My position is not to reject high stakes testing outright. We probably all share, to some degree, aspects of its 
ideology. However, the way that such testing is used at the present is doing more harm than good. Consequently, 
I now want to focus on how I think we can best improve the problem, and do so from within the framework of 
the economic worldview. The ultimate principle of the reigning economic logic is one of efficiency. As shown in 
the previous sections, high-stakes testing is not efficient: it is not achieving the goals for which it was established 
and in many cases even undermining these goals. This is an argument that people who promote current assess-
ment policies should be sensitive to.  We then have to propose a new form of testing, which demands staying 
inside the economic logic of education while avoiding its pifalls and limitations. 

 
I have focused most of my efforts so far on the negative effects of high-stakes testing. However, there are also 

successful stories of such testing (e.g. Gerstl-Pepin, 2006; Rigsby & DeMulder, 2003; Seachore Louis, Febey, & 
Schroeder, 2005). What most of these success stories have in common is that the policy was implemented in a 
democratic way. There is a clear correlation between the positive perception of the educational actors and the 
level of democracy they experience. There is also a clear correlation between the positive effects of testing and 
the democratic experience of the different actors. 

 
The problems that are reported by many people who have been involved with high-stakes testing appear to 

be the result of a top down policy that is rigidly applied. To be sure, we have to be careful in our judgement of 
whether top down policies are democratic or not. Top down designs are undemocratic according to a particular 
vision of democracy, yet they also retain important elements of democracy. For example, educational policies 
are applied by policymakers who themselves have received orders from politicians democratically elected. It is 
legitimate for the politician to ask for reforms since he receives his legitimacy from the community through a 
democratic process. It is through the politician that the community can act. I agree that this dimension of de-
mocracy is important, but it remains too limited as a model of effective policy implementation. 

 
I want to advance another vision of what it means to democratically implement an educational policy and 

standard, one that is informed by those studies that report a successful implementation of high-stakes testing. 
This model should not be seen in direct opposition to the hierarchical model mentioned above. I think both 
approaches can be seen as mutually complementary and informative of what democratic processes entail. I 
therefore do not promote an either/or approach to this topic.  From a minimalist standpoint, democracy occurs 
when individuals are given some power to discuss the issues in which they are concerned. This appears at the 
level of high-stakes testing when a certain degree of autonomy is granted teachers, schools and districts when it 
comes to the implementation of educational policy. However, a fuller picture of democracy occurs when the dif-
ferent actors are involved communally not only in the process of implementation but also in the decisions about 
standards and high-stakes testing in general. This means, for example, that the administration and teachers are 
collectively engaged in how they will adapt testing reform to meet their particular situation.  

 
When top down designs are implemented rigidly participatory democracy disappears, which leads to ineffec-

tive and dangerous results. In those cases that interest us, this happens when teachers see themselves as techni-
cians who are pressured to teach to the test. The results of this approach are ineffective, since it pits teachers 
against the very reform they need to implement. In Cuban’s (1998) analysis, there cannot be effective reform 
without adaptability. A top down design of high-stakes testing is dangerous because it leads to the creation of an 
education schedule of drills and memorization, wherein education is rendered largely useless for the students. 
We have also seen that this kind of situation is more likely to happen for those students already in difficulty or 
from low income communities. 

 
Rigidity in top down design leads to a loss of democracy inside the schools. It leads to what Olsen and Sexton 

(2009) call “threat rigidity”: “threat rigidity is the theory that an organization, when perceiving itself under siege 
(i.e. threatened or in crisis), responds in identifiable ways: structures tighten; centralized control increases; con-



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formity is stressed; accountability and efficiency measures are emphasized; and alternative or innovative thinking 
is discouraged” (p. 15).

 
As said earlier, I do not want to fall into an either/or position by saying that top down designs are necessarily 

bad and anti-democratic. However, it does seem clear that when top down designs are used rigidly they become 
undemocratic. Top down designs are democratic when they allow autonomy and local decisions; in others words, 
where decisions can still be experienced by participants as flowing from the bottom up and not just from the top. 
It is precisely when high-stakes testing is implemented with an eye to moderating both sides that it will be the 
most efficient and, unsurprisingly, the most democratic. In that sense, I think we should not separate democracy 
from efficiency, for both clearly go together on this matter.  Again, the language and measures of efficiency are es-
sential, because it gives us a common language from which to engage, and persuade, those within the economic 
paradigm of education.  

I think the best way to confront the prevailing ideology of high-stakes testing is to accept the criterion of ef-
ficiency in order to clearly show why current policies are failing to reach their goals. That said, I hope it remains 
clear that in taking this approach one is still moving the debate to another level. Indeed, what we mean by de-
mocracy is fundamentally an ideological issue, as is our vision of the teacher’s role in cultivating a democratic 
education, and how political policy should be implemented.  In using economic ideology against itself we are 
at the same time opening up the space for another kind of conceptualization. However, my hypothesis is that, 
in order for this political strategy to work, we need to be seen as ‘playing the game’ rather than confronting the 
issue directly as a battle of different ideologies of education.  

 
The issue of whether these two types of democracies, top down and grass roots, can be united is one of the 

most important and complex issues of policy and politics in the contemporary world. It is easy to say that top 
down design must encounter bottom up movement. However, it is impossible to clearly predict how that can 
happen concretely.  Indeed, how far can a policy design be flexible to local situations? Which points of a policy 
must be strictly adhered to, and which changed? There is no ultimate answer to these questions. This is an issue 
that flows out of, and follows, the politics and policy-making of a democracy. Fundamental to the nature of our 
democracies, is the union of local democracy with national democracy. If nothing else, it is our role as educators 
to demonstrate the complexity of democracy in action and challenge the simplistic view of participatory democ-
racy that inevtiably arises once quantitative methodology, and the positivism that underwrites it, are seen as the 
order of the day. Moreover, although the complexity of real democracy in action seems impossible to capture, the 
studies I referred to earlier show how different actors have been able to integrate, in a positive way, the policies 
of high-stakes testing. 

The underlying issue
 

In saying we should not confront the economic ideology directly, however, does not mean we should aban-
don the ideological discussion altogether.  To be sure, we need to engage in the political discussion in order to  
show what is at stake in the different ideologies of education.  I think this is nicely illustrated in the debate be-
tween those who acknowledge the complexity of reality, and those who continually affirm its simplicity. Accord-
ing to Cochran-Smith (2005), the complexity/simplicity dichotomy is at the root of two worldviews in education. 
The economic view in education is based on the conception that reality is simple. “Stone suggested that from a 
market model of policy making, the definition of policy problems is mistakenly regarded as a simple and straight-
forward matter of ‘observation and arithmetic’ ” (cited p. 133). Reality is unproblematic in this view, it is easy to 
judge situations and act to change them.  The following statement confirms this worldview: “In simplest terms, 
if the objective is to improve student performance, student performance should be the focal point of policy… I 
use a simple definition of teacher quality: good teachers are ones who get large gains in student achievement for 
their classes; bad teachers are just the opposite” (Hanushek cited in Cochran-Smith, 2005, pp. 183-184).  

 



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The present use of high-stakes testing is a good example of the simplicity of the economic worldview at work. 
It is based on the belief that student learning and knowledge is easily measurable, which ends up dissolving the 
complexity of school situations, as well as student lives, in order to emphasize their uniformity and unity. “One 
of the most basic assumptions embedded in technical standards is a naïve realism that assumes the world is a 
simple system made up of entities capable of precise empirical descriptions” (Jenlink & Austin, 2004, p. 4). In 
general, testing risks giving a simple vision of student reality by assuming it is easy to separate the loosers from 
the winners (Cuban, 1998, p. 456-7). 

The alternate worldview, as discussed by Cochran-Smith (2005), is one that embraces the complexity of real-
ity. Education is something hard to define, there are diverse conceptions of what a good education is, and we 
cannot subsume these views in one idea. The reality of students and schools is diverse and complex, and policy 
must be flexible enough to respect this. Therefore, testing alone, in virtue of its simplicity, is unable to give an 
accurate vision of educational reality, and so also remains unable to effectivley transform it. 

In the current situation, where the economic view dominates the landscape of policy research, it is our duty 
as scholars to present the weaknesses of this paradigm as well as present viable alternatives. In doing so, we have 
to be aware of how the dominant discourse of the day shapes our understanding of reality (Stovall, 2009; Torres 
& Van Heertum, 2009). It is only by entering in a debate with the dominant worldview that we can offer a more 
complex and authentic view of reality. That can only happen if we engage in thinking critically about our practice 
at all levels: our epistemology of education, our understanding of what democracy means, our role as scholars, 
our teaching practices, and finally our research methodology.  Engaging in such a multilevel process helps ensure 
two things: first, we do not separate ourselves from the other struggles taking place at different levels of educa-
tion, second, we do the best we can do in our specific role as scholars in higher education.  

Endnotes
I want to thank Marta Pires, Tyson Lewis and the two reviewers of 1. Analytic Teaching for their careful read-
ing and precious comments on the first version of this manuscript. 

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Address coresspondence to:
Olivier Michaud
michaudo1@mail.montclair.edu


