Standardised Testing: A Political Byproduct of Mass Education
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Introduction
Not every child was allowed to go to school half a decade ago. Child labour was normalised as people believed it was an essential proportion of the economy. Parents were reluctant to send their children to schools, fearing losing a healthy ‘worker’ for daily domestic labour. Therefore, the invention of mass education, as an outcome of Enlightenment liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, was widely praised as an educational milestone in human history. Despite its humanitarian values, has mass education successfully served its intended purposes of providing just and inclusive education to every child?
The Promises of Enlightenment Liberalism
The Enlightenment strongly influenced seventeenth and eighteenth-century European societies. Countries advocated securing equal well-being for their citizens to achieve national prosperity, reflecting the idea of enlightenment liberalism that individuals should be supported in obtaining freedom of choice and action within legal boundaries. In the field of education, enlightenment liberalism provided a foundational framework for mass education. Enlightenment thinkers, especially John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that the state should provide universal schooling to nurture individuals’ potential and develop them into virtuous and successful citizens.
However, from a political perspective, this was not the rationale for mass education. Under Austria’s late eighteenth-century Habsburg monarchy, the purposes of mass education were centred around religion, morality, and civic learning as a tool for centralised control. In other European nonmonarchy societies, mass education was perceived as an approach to nation-building and state unification. Therefore, although the enforcement of education acts in Enlightenment-era Europe guaranteed basic educational opportunities, it was primarily motivated by political rather than educational objectives, thus potentially failing to address a major educational issue: inclusivity.
Examination of the role of Enlightenment-era education in fostering inclusivity requires revisiting the foundational framework of mass education. Cahoone discusses controversial aspects of enlightenment liberalism, one of which is its questioned power neutrality. While Cahone reemphasises the relative liberal nature of enlightenment liberalism that best allows the negotiation of power between classes, it is simultaneously indicative of the continuous social and economic inferiority of the disadvantaged class. This is because enlightenment liberalism constructs universal regulations for aggregate welfare, which is grounded in reason, to avoid the dominance of any single power. However, regarding individuals who have already been facing structural inequalities, equal rights do not put them in an equal position with more advantaged individuals.
When its political motivation and practice are considered in light of structural inequalities, Enlightenment liberalism appears to promise mass education that distributes equal educational resources rather than equal educational opportunities. Although enlightenment liberalism has evolved, its core principle is still embedded in modern liberalism. This explains contemporary educational challenges regarding inclusivity in supposedly liberal societies; that is, to construct an education system where all students have access to the same learning experiences regardless of their economic and identity backgrounds.
In facilitating multicultural classrooms, pedagogies such as culturally responsive pedagogy (teaching through students’ cultural lens to promote cultural inclusion) and funds of knowledge (connecting students’ domestic and community-sourced knowledge with curriculum content) have already been researched and practiced. However, economic disparity can only be resolved through macro-level interventions, which might still be intentionally ignored to some extent due to political complexities. Therefore, it should be expected that as long as mass education is associated with liberalism, which it is inherently, educational equity is virtually unachievable. It should also be noted that political factors are not the only contributors to mass education, but social and economic drivers as well.
In Coincidence with the Industrial Revolution
Although mass education movements were initiated and most prevalent during the Industrial Revolution era, this co-occurrence does not mean there was a causal relationship between universal schooling and rapid economic growth. The Industrial Revolution has long been deemed an economic milestone, though this view has been challenged by Jackson in 2012. It is undetermined if there was relatively rapid economic growth compared to previous periods due to the lack of objective and reliable quantitative data. Meanwhile, from a historical perspective, it appears that the Industrial Revolution is actually only the beginning of Britain’s latest great wave of economic growth, with a legacy dating back to the 1000s. Hence, if mass education is partially rooted in rapid economic growth, it should have been discussed decades before the Industrial Revolution.
Regardless, the Industrial Revolution remains closely connected to mass education, as it results in societies in which schooling is necessary for national development. A common belief among countries advocating mass education was that the nation-level values of innovative technologies and new knowledge were conditioned by the literacy and numeracy of their citizens. In other words, investing in education for the public was perceived as a strategy for long-term economic development in an industrialised world. Mass education was a driver rather than an outcome of economic growth. Contemporary research also indicates that the return on investment in human capital accumulation, either in quantity or quality, is universally promising across both developed and developing countries.
However, the financial security of educational investments was not a sufficient incentive for nineteenth-century countries to initiate mass education acts. One rationale is that political ideologies largely shaped education policies. In the nineteenth century, Western countries were deeply interested in the nation-state ideology, which later spread to other continents due to globalisation. The nation-state model comprises two components: unified sovereignty and universal social identity. Countries prioritise achieving these to the point of distorting the actual purposes of education, as it was considered the fastest and most impactful route to influence the masses. Meyer and colleagues argue that through standardised curriculum and testing, governments exert huge control over the knowledge intake of their citizens and aim to impose a sense of citizenship on the masses to strengthen national representation.
The ideology of the nation-state model strongly aligns with nationalism, which emphasises national identity to the extent of underrepresenting individual identity. This is opposed to the educational philosophy of nurturing individuals’ potential that emerged from Enlightenment liberalism. If mass education was not initially designed to serve authentic rather than politically biased educational objectives, should its implementation tools be deemed political byproducts as well?
Standardised Testing as the Masquerade of Authentic Education: A Case Study of Australia’s NAPLAN
The earliest practices of standardised testing can be traced back to the Keju examination system of Ancient China. Meanwhile, in Western societies, the earliest evidence of standardised testing dates back to the 16th century, specifically in colleges.
Historical standardised testing practices share certain philosophies. First, it was originally intended to prevent corruption in civil employment. This reflects meritocracy, or institutional efforts to fairly distribute quality resources according to individuals’ merit. This resembles the idea of Enlightenment liberalism that the state ought to support, in this context, by providing an environment where individuals can autonomously reach freedom in choice and action. Nevertheless, merit must be nurtured through quality education, which can be inaccessible for less meritorious individuals in a meritocratic society. Considering that inequalities shape an individual’s academic competencies, meritocracy, similar to enlightenment liberalism, eventually creates a vicious cycle where disadvantaged individuals are worse off, while advantaged individuals are better off.
Second, historical data show that the increased use of standardised testing tends to be initiated by sustained low performance in international tests. It is expected that national educational performance would improve if direct stakeholders were held accountable for their behaviours, reflecting the political interest of nation-building in terms of the educational competencies of citizens. Therefore, governments aimed to promote test-based accountability through outcome-based education (OBE). It is intended to benchmark a student cohort’s competencies by pre-determining educational objectives. This makes standardised testing an appropriate means for delivering OBE. OBE is also regarded as an underdeveloped version of competency-based education (CBE) due to its overemphasis on standards and accountability. In contrast, CBE relies more on students’ self-monitoring of their capability development, with teachers’ interventions where necessary.
In the Australian education system, the National Assessment Program (NAP) comprises national standardised assessments, which are designed to provide insights into students’ decline, growth, or stagnation in the development of essential academic skills at particular year levels. Each NAP assessment’s development process is regulated and communicated via an assessment framework paper, which informs the assessment’s purposes, target audience, content coverage, marking scale, and question design.
Acting as the NAP’s core performance indicator due to its census-testing mechanism, the National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN) assessment is evaluated to inform directions of improvement for the program. In a 2023 evaluation report of the NAP, the Australian Education Research Organisation suggests that the performance gap on NAPLAN between students from low and high socioeconomic status (SES) has been enlarging. From early stages, children from low SES households are constrained in access to quality early-care education, which is more prevalent in high SES neighbourhoods, as it is driven by demand and affordability. During the middle stages, low-SES students are also less exposed to the academic curriculum, further placing them at a less academically competitive position compared to their high-SES peers.
Racial disadvantages also contribute to the failure of standardised testing in remote regions. Considering the Australian context, the language and content of NAPLAN are not designed to align with the cultural context of First Nations communities. Meaningful participation in NAPLAN requires proficiency in Standard Australian English. This poses considerable challenges for First Nations students whose first language is not English, not to mention that they have limited to no resources to practice the language outside the classroom. Furthermore, the contexts of testing questions, such as recycling and popular leisure activities, are quite unfamiliar to First Nations students. Lacking the knowledge considered common by NAPLAN designers, First Nations students in low-SES neighbourhoods face a double disadvantage.
Fortunately, the public is well aware of the malfunctioning of the embedded ideology of standardised testing, or meritocracy, regarding addressing inequality gaps. Considering the focus of the merit-driven education system on justness instead of equity, it is argued that standardised testing acts as a tool for racial projects, aiming to further strengthen social inequalities through educational inequalities.
Nevertheless, considering that standards are still essential to a well-constructed education system, the question remains whether there is a blended testing approach that balances between OBE and meritocracy—the previously argued embedded educational philosophies of standardised testing—and CBE, which is regarded as the fully developed version of OBE.
The Possibility of Alternative Assessment Approaches
This section will present a case study of ‘STREAM School’—a project-based program for middle school students dedicated to connecting academic knowledge with real-life experiences. Project-based assessment involves evaluating student performance through practical problem-solving activities. It aims to develop students’ ability to demonstrate their capabilities rather than memorizing content, aligning with the intention of CBE.
Implementation of ‘STREAM School’ results in enhanced learning experience, learning motivation, learning engagement, and learning autonomy, which are the main weaknesses of standardised testing regarding student learning. Furthermore, students participating in the program still perform well in domestic standardised testing, suggesting that project-based learning can also meet the criteria of OBE.
This raises the question of whether macro-level implementation of standardised testing is the definitive approach to advance the quality of education systems. In response to that, researchers advocate lowering the stakes of standardised testing to mitigate their negative effects on authentic education, while retaining their benefits of reliability and validity.
Therefore, this article suggests that further research should be conducted into the efficacy of macro-level implementation of project-based assessment and low-stakes standardised testing. These are potential alternative or complementary approaches to traditional standardised testing, with a mutual objective of constructing an evidence-based education system while preserving the authenticity of education.