© Copyright Tony Wagner, 1999 (first published in School Administrator, December 1999)

Most of us achieve more when we have aim for a higher bar. As a motivator, fear gets us only so far. That will be the big "a-ha" in education a few years from now--fear of not being promoted, fear of not graduating, fear of sanctions and, above all, fear of tests. These fears will begin to weigh us down rather than help us over the bar.

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In coming years, we also will better understand that a bureaucratic system that enforces compliance through fear of consequences is both inefficient and unstable. Teachers, parents and students tend to do just the minimum in such a system. They only jump as high as they have to, while many become increasingly resentful.

We already are seeing serious flaws in the standards and high-stakes testing systems now employed in most states. The New York Times reported this fall that a growing number of able students are refusing to take the new tests. In Wisconsin, parents rejected proposed new tests when they realized the knowledge required to do well on them was little more than an academic version of the board game Trivial Pursuit. Parents in other states with high failure rates--notably Virginia and New York--are coming to similar conclusions.

Finally, early indications are that the imposition of high-stakes tests actually will increase the dropout rates at the high school level. In fact, some fear that policymakers and educational leaders know many of today’s high school kids will never pass the new tests. They view these kids as sacrificial lambs. Their failures are the means by which the next generation is supposed to get the message.

Though well-intended and meant to address real issues of inequity and poor performance, the standards movement in the final analysis is a last-ditch attempt to save an ossified and under-resourced bureaucratic system through a little tinkering at the margins. The implicit assumption behind the high-stakes tests is that the system hasn’t worked because teachers, parents and students aren’t doing their jobs and the fear of consequences will improve their performance. We don’t need to change the system, so the theory goes; we just need to ratchet it up.