The evils of standardized assessment and how to overcome them (The chilean experience)
Jorge Inzunza H.*
The Stop SIMCE campaign. Photo: Radiovillafrancia.cl Photo: Alejandro Pardo
On January 14 2015, Professor Gary Anderson of New York University published a provocative paper entitled “Lessons from Chile: Annual Testing in Schools.� In this article, Anderson states that since Chile was the first neoliberal experiment, it was the first to create an assessment system so that parents and policy makers would have data to be effective consumers in the education market. He also acknowledges that the movement of students and teachers in Chile is carrying out a strong fight against high-impact standardization. Why is it relevant to analyze the Chilean experience in the context of current struggles against neoliberal policies in other regions of the world? We will try to explore some answers in the following paragraphs. We will start by offering some background information regarding the National System for Measuring Education Quality in Chile (SIMCE), then we will describe how the organized resistance against it emerged through the Stop SIMCE campaign. Finally, we will look into the conservative response to the campaign and explain why there is a need to create a global resistance against high-impact standardized assessment.
Background:
SIMCE officially started in 1998, but its appearance was no accident in Chilean educational history. It was the result of a series of ideological fights within the civilian/military dictatorship (1973-1990) that ended up adopting neoliberalism as its main political framework. Between 1973 and 1980, repression was the social and * PhD in Education from UNICAMP (Brazil). Member of the Stop SIMCE Campaign. First-grade teacher at Turtle Creek Elementary School, Wisconsin (USA). E-mail: jinzunzah@gmail.com
psychological conditioning instrument the dictatorship used to establish its reforms and dismantle the main features of the former Chilean state. From 1976 on, the neoliberal influence became hegemonic. The new education system took essential elements from the neoliberal model, and incorporated Catholic precepts such as a hyper-protection of parental freedom of choice and teaching freedom and blended them with authoritarian features such as meritocracy, ranking and order. Those elements were chosen to create an education system designed to destroy public education. At the beginning of the 1980s, Chile began a deep transformation. The predominantly public education system became decentralized. The struggles of the teachers union were fragmented and it was suppressed and replaced by an organization controlled by the dictatorship. According to neoliberal ideology, the education system was simply a group of suppliers selling a product (education) to a market of customers (families). The role of the state was reduced to merely ensuring the necessary conditions for a self-regulating market to operate. This market needs information to function, which is the political/theoretical reasoning behind the creation of high-impact assessment instruments. In 1984, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile developed a new measurement instrument, the PER Performance Assessment. This was the first step in the creation of one of the first standardized assessment tests in Latin America. The test was born in a context where the public system was being deprived of financing and the constitution privileged educational entrepreneurship by private parties. Standardized tests were meant as a compass for parents to exercise their right to decide which school to choose for their children.
august 2015, Intercambio 7
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