Twenty-five years ago futurist Joel Barker popularized the now everyday term, paradigm. He defined it as a set of assumptions, concepts and practices that we mix together into a more or less unified way of viewing and making sense of our reality. Every community has its own paradigms for everything from what it means to be a patriot to what constitutes good behavior when attending church.

Because they seem to serve us well, our paradigms are seldom critically examined. To paraphrase Thomas Paine, "A long habit of not thinking [about a thing], gives it the superficial appearance of being right."

Over time, our paradigms become myths and some of them need debunking.

Tests and economic growth. Standardized testing presents one such unexamined paradigm. For most educators, tests are necessary for sorting and sifting students into different lots where different limited resources may be fairly allocated. These tests, from the PSSA to the SAT to the L-MAT are worth very little beyond this and are, after all, only paper-and-pencil exercises that assess only low-level cognitive skills.

When global assessments show American students to be behind their international peers, educators find many reasons for why this is so.

They say that other countries test only their best students (not true), that we teach EVERYONE in our country(except the almost 30 percent that drop out), and we emphasize creativity not banal memorization (look closely at the next test your child brings home).

Such rationalizations are based on our testing paradigm — that tests really matter little except as hoops to be jumped though. As reasonable and self-justifying explanations, they provide the superficial appearance of being right. Students learn this paradigm early on and learn to cheat (if the carrot is important enough) or to disassociate themselves from the test (ask a high school teacher how seriously students approach their 11th-grade PSSAs).

But test scores have much more importance as indicators of economic health. In a report conducted by the World Bank titled "Education and Economic Growth," researchers analyzed 50 countries' test scores over a 40-year period. They found that the quality of a country's educational system as measured by "the performance of students on tests in math and science" has a large effect on its subsequent economic growth rate.

Superficially, countries with higher test scores experienced far higher growth rates than those with lower scores. A high-scoring country (as determined by its academic test scores) contributes 1 percentage point to its economic gross domestic product every year. A lower-scoring country contributes lower (even negative) points to the GDP.

Student test scores — when treated as growth indicators — signify a highly educated workforce and directly affect a country's economic well-being.

Teachers matter. A second myth is that all teachers assist their students in becoming equally successful in school. Students know this is not true and so do the parents who request specific teachers for their children. Educators, most often for political reasons, publicly perpetuate this myth by saying that all of their teachers are equally effective. But recent research refutes this myth with well-analyzed data.

The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers study from Harvard asked, "Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores a good measure of their quality?" Labeling teachers who have high impact as value-added, or VA, they found that students of such teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in higher socioeconomic neighborhoods, save more for retirement and are less likely to have children as teenagers.

Carrying their studies into economic territory, researchers reported that a VA teacher "in a single grade raises each student's earnings by about 1 percent at age 28." In like fashion, they found that "replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5 percent with an average VA teacher would increase the present value of students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for an average classroom."

The researchers concluded that high VA teachers create substantial economic value for their students and that test score impact is a very helpful to identify these teachers.

Education, income and employment. The rags-to-riches story of the self-made success is a unique paradigm of American exceptionalism.

Politicians love this social-Darwinist myth that by just pulling up ones' boot-straps, working hard and never asking for help, the road to economic success is assured.

The wage stagnation and unemployment growth of the past few years have caused some conservative politicians to downplay the value of education. One can see this play out in their decreased financial support for public schooling and in their reluctance to assist young people in meeting those costs.

Advanced education — whether gotten in the military or in vocational or academic schools — still provides the best access to both higher wages and job stability. The Bureau of Labor Statistics relates weekly income to educational attainment: $444, no high school diploma; $626, a high school diploma; $767, an associate degree; $1,038, a bachelor's degree; and $1,550, a doctoral degree. Any advanced learning leads to higher wages.

Likewise, it links unemployment to educational level: 14.9 percent, no high school diploma; 10.3 percent, a high school education; 7 percent, an associate degree; 5.4 percent, a bachelor's degree; 2.4 percent, a professional degree; and 1.9 percent, a doctoral degree. Advanced education leads to greater employment.

It has been apparent that improving one's personal skill sets in either blue-or white-collar jobs increases the economic quality of one's life. What has changed is that the once-learned skill sets cannot be allowed to stagnate; they have to be very actively maintained, augmented and strengthened throughout one's working career.

Our mythologies die hard. When one calls them into question, there is a formidable outcry in defense of the paradigm. "But," as Paine reminds us, "the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

Dr. Jacques Gibble, a retired instructor from Penn State's York campus, is a leadership consultant. He is also a correspondent for Lancaster Newspapers Inc. Email him at sunnews@lnpnews.com.