Under the banner of "higher standards for all," Oregon has joined the national testing craze. In fall 1998, the Oregon Department of Education field-tested its first-ever statewide social studies assessments. Many teachers were dismayed to discover that the tests were a multiple-choice maze that lurched about helter-skelter, seeking answers on World War I, Constitutional amendments, global climate, rivers in India, hypothetical population projections, Supreme Court decisions, and economic terminology.
Given the broad scope of the standards and the resulting randomness of the test questions they generated, an infinite number of facts could appear on future social studies tests. Teachers worry that to prepare our students for the tests, which students must pass to earn Oregon's 10th grade Certificate of Initial Mastery, we will have to turn our classrooms into vast wading pools of information for students to memorize.
The tests in Oregon are part of a national standards movement that has a democratic veneer. Proponents insist that all students will benefit from "higher expectations" and greater teacher, principal, and school "accountability." But as the Oregon example shows, standardization of social studies curriculums and assessments is hostile to good teaching. Social studies standardization threatens a multicultural curriculum—one that attempts to explain the world as it really exists; speaks to the diversity of our society; and aims not only to teach important facts, but also to develop citizens who can make the world safer and more just.
Multiculturalism is a search to discover perspectives that have been silenced in traditional scholastic narratives. Multiculturalism attempts to uncover "the histories and experiences of people who have been left out of the curriculum," as educator Enid Lee emphasizes (1995, p. 9). Because multiculturalism is an undertaking that requires new scholarship and constant discussion, it is necessarily ongoing. Yet as researcher Harold Berlak points out, "Standardization and centralization of curriculum testing is an effort to put an end to a cacophony of voices on what constitutes truth, knowledge and learning and what the young should be taught. It insists upon one set of answers" (Berlak, in press).
A Lack of Critical Sensibility
Creating an official, government-approved social studies curriculum is bound to be controversial. Thus, state education officials "tried to stake a neutral ground" to win approval for the state's version of social reality (Learn, 1998). Not surprisingly, this attempt to be neutral and inoffensive means that the standards the state produced lack a critical sensibility and tend toward a conservative Father Knows Best portrait of society. For example, one typical 10th grade benchmark calls for students to "understand how the Constitution can be a vehicle for change and for resolving issues as well as a device for preserving values and principles of society." Only? Is this how, say, Frederick Douglass or the Seminole leader Osceola would have seen the Constitution? Shouldn't students also understand how the Constitution can be (and has been) a vehicle for preserving class and race stratification—for example, Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson—and for maintaining the privileges of dominant social groups? Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution an "agreement with Hell" for its support of slavery.
The school curriculum will inevitably reflect the contradictions between a society's myths and realities. But a critical multicultural approach examines these contradictions, whereas standardization tends to paper over them. For example, another benchmark, "Explain how laws are developed and applied to provide order, set limits, protect basic rights, and promote the common good," similarly fails the multicultural test. Whose order, whose basic rights, are protected by laws? Are all social groups included equally in the term common good? Between 1862 and 1890, laws in the United States gave an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma to privately owned railroad companies, but gave virtually no land to African Americans freed from slavery. Viewing the Constitution and other U.S. laws through a multicultural lens would add depth to the facile one-sidedness of Oregon's "neutral" standards.
Standards Miss the Multicultural Mark
Indeed the "R" word, racism, is not mentioned in the 1998 11th grade field tests or in the social studies standards adopted in March 1998 by the Oregon board of education. Even if the only yardstick were strict historical accuracy, this would be a bizarre omission: The state was launched as a whites-only territory by the Oregon Donation Act and in racist wars of dispossession waged against indigenous peoples; the first constitution outlawed slavery but also forbade blacks from living in the state, a prohibition that remained law until 1927.
Perhaps state education officials are concerned that introducing the concept of racism to students could call into question the essentially harmonious world of "change and continuity over time" that underpins the standards project. Whatever the reason, students cannot make sense of the world today without carrying the idea of racism in their conceptual knapsack. If a key goal of multiculturalism is to account for how the past helped shape the present, and an important part of the present is social inequality, then Oregon's standards and tests earn a failing grade.
Despite the publication of state social studies standards and benchmarks, teachers or parents don't really know what students are expected to learn until they see the tests, which were developed by an out-of-state assessment corporation, MetriTech. As Wade W. Nelson points out in a frank article, "The Naked Truth About School Reform in Minnesota" (that might as well have been written about Oregon) (1998),The content of the standards is found only in the tests used to assess them. Access to the tests themselves is carefully controlled, making it difficult to get a handle on what these standards are. It seems ironic to me that basic standards—that which every student is expected to know or be able to do—are revealed only in tests accessible only to test-makers and administrators. This design avoids much of the debate about what these standards ought to be.
When we look directly at the tests, their limitations and negative implications for multiculturalism become most clear. Test questions inevitably focus on discrete facts, but cannot address the deeper, multifaceted meaning of facts. For example, in the field tests that Oregon piloted in fall 1998, one question asked which Constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote. Students could know virtually nothing about the long struggle for women's rights and get this question right. In contrast, they could know lots about the feminist movement and not recall that it was the 19th and not the 16th, 17th, or 18th Amendment (the other test choices) that gave women the vote.
Because there is no way to predict precisely which facts will be sought on the state tests, teachers feel pressured to turn courses into a "memory Olympics"; we simply cannot afford to spend the time probing beneath the headlines of history.
Last year, my students at Franklin High School in Portland performed a role-play on the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, women's rights conference, the first formal U.S. gathering to demand greater equality for women. The original assembly was composed largely of middle- to upper-class white women. I wanted my students not only to appreciate the issues that these women addressed and their courage, but also to consider the limitations imposed by their race, class, and ethnicity. Thus in our simulated 1848 gathering, my students portrayed women who were not at the original conference—enslaved African Americans, Cherokee women who had been forcibly moved to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, Mexican women in the recently conquered territory of New Mexico, poor white New England mill workers—as well as the white middle- and upper-class reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott who were in attendance.
In this more socially representative fictional assembly, students learned about the resolutions adopted at the original gathering and the conditions that prompted them, and they also saw firsthand how more privileged white women ignored other important issues, such as treaty rights of Mexican women, sexual abuse of enslaved African Americans, and workplace exploitation of poor white women, that a more diverse convention might have addressed.
The knowledge that my students acquired from this role-play consisted not only of "facts," although they learned plenty of these. They also exercised their multicultural social imaginations, listening for the voices that are often silenced in the traditional U.S. history narrative and becoming more alert to issues of race and class. However, this kind of teaching and learning takes time—time that could be ill-afforded in the fact-packing pedagogy required by multiple-choice tests. And after all their study, would my students have recalled which amendment gave women the right to vote? If not, they would have appeared ignorant about the struggle for women's rights.
Likewise, my Global Studies students spend the better part of a quarter reading, discussing, role-playing, and writing about the consequences of European colonialism. They read excerpts from Okot p'Bitek's poignant book-length poem, Song of Lawino, about the lingering psychological effects of colonialism in Uganda; role-play a trial on the colonial roots of the Irish potato famine; and examine how Asian economies were distorted to serve the needs of European ruling classes. But when confronted with multiple-choice questions that demand that they recall isolated facts about colonialism in 1914, would my students answer correctly? As these examples illustrate, a multicultural curriculum is not so much about teaching facts as it is about nurturing a fuller understanding of society.
Misrepresenting Social Realities
Not surprisingly, Oregon's "one best answer" approach vastly oversimplifies complex social processes—and entirely erases ethnicity and race as categories of analysis. One question on a recent test reads: "In 1919, over 4.1 million Americans belonged to labor unions. By 1928, that number had dropped to 3.4 million. Which of the following best accounts for that drop?" It seems that the correct answer must be A: "Wages increased dramatically, so workers didn't need unions." All the other answers are clearly wrong, but is this answer "correct"? Do workers automatically leave unions when they win higher wages? Weren't mechanization and scientific management factors in undermining traditional craft unions? Did the post-World War I Red Scare, with systematic attacks on radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World and deportations of foreign-born labor organizers, affect union membership?
And how about the Oregon test's reductive category of "worker"? Shouldn't students be alert to how race, ethnicity, and gender were and are important factors in determining one's workplace experience, including union membership? For example, in 1919, professional strikebreakers, hired by steel corporations, were told to "stir up as much bad feeling as you possibly can between the Serbians and the Italians." And more than 30,000 black workers, excluded from AFL unions, were brought in as strikebreakers (Zinn, 1980, p. 372). A multicultural awareness is vital to arriving at a full answer to this Oregon field-test question. But the state would reward students for choosing a historical sound bite that is as shallow as it is wrong.
What Tests Communicate
Another aspect of these tests is especially offensive to teachers: They don't merely assess, they also instruct. The tests represent the authority of the state, implicitly telling students, "Just memorize the facts, kids. That's what social studies is all about—and if teachers do any more than that, they're wasting your time." Multiple-choice tests undermine teachers' efforts to construct a rigorous multicultural curriculum because they delegitimate that curriculum in students' eyes: If it were important, it would be on the test.
At its core, multicultural teaching is an ethical, even a political, enterprise. Its aim is not just to impart lots of interesting facts—to equip students to be proficient Trivial Pursuit players—but to help make the world a better place. It highlights injustice of all kinds—racial, gender, class, linguistic, ethnic, national, environmental—to make explanations and propose solutions. It recognizes our responsibility to fellow human beings and to the earth. It has heart and soul.
Compare that with the sterile fact-collecting orientation of Oregon's standards and assessments. For example, a typical 49-question high school field test piloted in 1998 included seven questions on global climate, two on the location of rivers, and one on hypothetical world population projections. But not a single question in the test concerned the lives of people around the world or environmental conditions—nothing about increasing poverty, the global AIDS epidemic, rainforest destruction, unemployment rates, global warming, or efforts to address these crises. The test bounded aimlessly from one disjointed fact to another.
Indeed, the test's randomness may reveal another of its cultural biases. Oregon's standards and assessments make no distinction between knowledge and information. The state's version of social education would appear to have no purpose beyond the acquisition of large quantities of data. But for many cultures, the aim of knowledge is not bulk, but wisdom—insight into meaningful aspects about the nature of life. Writing in Rethinking Schools, Peter Kiang makes a similar point about the Massachusetts Teacher Test that calls into question the validity of enterprises such as these. He writes that by constructing a test based on a sequence of isolated, decontextualized questions that have no relationship to each other, the underlying epistemology embedded in the test design has a Western-cultural bias, even if individual questions include or represent "multicultural" content. Articulating and assessing a knowledge base requires examining not only what one knows, but also how one knows. (Kiang, 1998/99, p. 23)
Students "know" in different ways, and these differences are often cultural. Oregon nonetheless subjects all students to an abstract, data-heavy assessment device that does not gauge what or how they have learned. As Kiang points out, test makers address multicultural criticism by including individual questions about multicultural content—for example, by highlighting snippets of information about famous people of color like Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Harriet Tubman. But these "heroes and holidays" additions cannot mask the fundamental hostility to multicultural education shown by standards and assessments like those initiated by Oregon.
The alternative? I want the state to abandon its effort to turn me into a delivery system of approved social information. I want it to support me and other teachers as we collaborate to create curriculum that deals forthrightly with social problems, that fights racism and social injustice. I want it to acknowledge the legitimacy of a multicultural curriculum of critical questions, complexity, multiple perspectives, and social imagination. I want it to admit that wisdom is more than information—that the world can't be chopped up into multiple-choice questions and that you can't bubble-in the truth with a number-two pencil.
