It’s on the test

Abstract

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk (United States, 1983) the primary national moves in education reform have called for a two-fold approach of developing rigorous standards accompanied by a standards based approach of education (Fuller, 2009; Marzano & Kendall, 1996; Ravitch, 1995). This call has resulted in several waves of education reform including the Bush era “No Child Left Behind” and the Obama administrations “Race to the Top” (Fuller 2009) both calling for rigorous standards, standardized assessments, and teacher accountability based on these assessments. While there is a great deal of literature demanding standards and assessment, there is a dearth of research discussing the relationships of assessment and standards as well as the impact these documents have on education. In this paper I use a Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin & Rose, 2005) protocol to analyze and compare the curricular and assessment documents of the State of Georgia, and I use transactional analysis (Stewart, 2010, 2011) to understand how these reform movements and the resulting standards and assessments have affected classroom planning and instruction.