High-stakes educational testing and democracy – antagonistic or symbiotic relationship?

What is it about?

This article argues that high-stakes educational testing, along with the attendant questions of power, education access, education management and social selection, cannot be considered in isolation from society at large. Thus, high-stakes testing practices bear numerous implications for democratic conditions in society. For decades, advocates of high-stakes educational testing have argued that testing would result in meritocracy, ensuring that everyone would be afforded the same opportunities to find success in adulthood. Examined from a critical perspective, however, we learn that testing is also extremely well designed as a bulwark against opposing or alternative outlooks and opinions, because testing is a complex tool requiring highly specialised knowledge to administer effectively. This article sets out to investigate the relation between high-stakes educational testing and democracy drawn from the experiences of 20th-century high-stakes educational testing practices in the Danish history of education. Among other things, the article concludes that a combination of different evaluation technologies – some formative and some summative – might be the safest way to go from a democratic perspective.

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