THE STANDARDS OF LEARNING TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE AND THE EICHMANN DEFENSE
Gerald W. Bracey
Columnist EducationNews.org

The Standards of Learning Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) has issued a report. Kirk Schroder, president of the Virginia Board of Education said the committee called SOL "one of the better [programs] in the country" (the report said no such thing).

In fact, the TAC's report is an exemplar of The Eichmann Defense. Adolph Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish section, was tried by Israel for the murder of 5,000,000 Jews during World War II. Eichmann claimed he was just a bureaucrat and couldn't be held responsible because he was just following orders. The Israeli Court disagreed.

Similarly, the TAC washed its hands of the psychological or educational deaths of any Virginia students. It claimed in its very opening paragraph that "The purposes of the educational assessments at selected grades (3, 5, and 8) and high school subjects are to inform parents and teachers about what students are learning in relation to the SOL and to hold schools accountable for teaching the SOL content. Therefore, this review has been undertaken only with these two purposes in mind; any other applications or uses of these assessments, such as for grade advancement or high school graduation, have not been considered." If Eichmann were alive, he'd smile at the TAC's wily use of his logic.

We are only looking at limited technical aspects of the tests such as content validity, reliability, and standard setting., said the TAC We are mere technicians, merely following orders. Well, for those who accepted the Program of the Third Reich, Auschwitz was merely a technical problem. Within the assumptions and goals of Hitler's regime, it was both reliable and valid.

Students must pass algebra I to graduate. Consider these pass rates for Algebra 1 at Richmond High Schools:

Armstrong 5.8%

Huguenot 9.0%

Jefferson 19.8%

Kennedy 10.3%

Marshall 4.6%

Wythe 2.6%

Open High 51.9%

Community 63.6%

Governor's School 100%

These results are themselves atrocities. But, the TAC is not concerned with fact that the overwhelming majority of Richmond students are failing this required course. Did the TAC even see these results?

The TAC cannot absolve itself from the issues raised by these results by a claiming that they are mere technicians addressing a couple of merely technical issues. The SOL program is, like all such programs around the country, at least as much a political and moral (or immoral) program as it is an educational program. Everyone involved must address the political and moral issues. To avoid taking a stand is to take a stand.

The TAC might argue that the SOL program didn't produce these dreadful results, it merely revealed them. The TAC might get by with such an excuse, but Schroder and the Board certainly cannot. We didn't need the SOL to know how things would come out. Results like this been turning up since at least the 1970's when I served as Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing for the Virginia Department of Education.

The question is: Why won't the State Board of Education and the legislature ever do something about them? The funds appropriated for "remedial" efforts to date are pathetic.

The results above show once again that the Commonwealth of Virginia is not really interested in the education of African-American children. The University of Virginia's E. D. Hirsch, Jr., often considered the father of the SOL program has said that it could be used as an instrument of social justice. Even Hirsch, though, chided the Board for not providing the resources needed to render the SOL as anything more than a magnifier of social injustice.

The TAC ought to refuse further activity in the service of such a program and ought to return whatever blood money its members have been paid for their services. After all, independent of what the Israeli Court thought of Eichmann, the Nuremberg Precedent, established in the war trials that followed World War II, is still in effect: People have a moral obligation to disobey immoral orders.

Gerald W. Bracey is an independent researcher and writer at 1797 Duffield Lane, Alexandria, VA, 703-317-1715. He is author of the annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" (Phi Delta Kappan, October), and Put to the Test: An Educator's and Consumer's Guide to Standardized Testing. From 1997 to 1986 he was Director of Research, Evaluation, and Testing for the Virginia Department of Education. His forthcoming book is titled The War on America's Public Schools (Allyn and Bacon, June 2001).