Pay attention: Standardized tests are destroying education, part 1 (of 874)
I have this ongoing belief that most of the woes we deal with as a nation, as a species are because we just haven’t paid enough attention; I think, I guess in what is an unshakable optimism about human potential (and you may read this as “delusion”), that once we are shocked awake to stupidity and injustice, we will fix it. In that regard, I am convinced that if we stepped back and thought hard — with real clarity and attention — about the amount of time U.S. students now spend preparing for the filling in of little bubbles and then filling in those bubbles, overnight we would have a massive education revolution.
Yeah, maybe you’re right about my penchant for delusion. But you know how when you study history you can’t help but be stunned by some of the things we used to do? I’m convinced that when our great-grandchildren look back on us, it will take some serious convincing to get them to understand that in our country in 2011, with all our smarts, energy, innovation, and entrepreneurial genius, that we put so much of our educational effort — and money — into those little bubbles.
Standardized testing is one of the great educational plagues of our time. In my reading about this topic over the past two decades, it is evident that almost everyone involved with education in a nuts-and-bolts way is disgusted by testing. Yet, we’re so addicted to standardized tests, or, more specifically, to the sorcerer’s spell of “results” they’ve promised to deliver, that we’ve struggled to acknowledge there are smarter ways to assess student progress or potential.
So how did we let people fool us into using simple metrics to demonstrate proficiency? Why have we let ourselves adopt the expensive ruse that is standardized testing? Why is it so difficult to find people actively working in education who believe these tests are good? How can it be that measures that clearly are influenced by factors like family income, access to preparation, and knowledge of testing strategies are still widely regarded as useful ways to see how well we are doing in anything?
In short, how did we get here?
What will it take for us to wake up and identify the people behind testing and their motives and then sweep away this small but disproportionately powerful group that controls, advocates, and profits from standardized testing?
No doubt, we need to measure school effectiveness. But filling in bubbles should never have been the primary means of accountability. We are too good to reduce human knowledge to bubbles, and there are many, many other ways to assess education and schools (to be explored in part 4 of this series; see below). People are realizing this. For instance, some universities, including big players like DePaul, are replacing SAT or ACT scores with written responses to essay questions to find out who is really a good candidate to succeed.
A few months ago, Obama said students should take fewer tests. In a candid comment, Obama said about testing, “”All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting. And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in. They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.” After citing Obama, E.D Kain, a Forbes writer, commented further about the environment standardized testing breeds: “… testing alone cannot measure the success of our schools or students or teachers. But if we hold everyone accountable to the tests, we’re bound to see cheating and other bad behaviors emerge. It’s time to move on.”
Here’s hoping we are moving on, but hoping won’t be good enough. It will take a kind of attention that we haven’t yet exercised, an attention that turns to action. Educator Marion Brady calls for direct action by educators and students, evoking the image of an “ancient chariot being pulled through narrow city streets, carrying a crude idol of a god”; that god is “The Standardized Test.” Brady ends his article by citing The Bartleby Project, from Weapons of Mass Instruction author John Taylor Gatto, encouraging “an open conspiracy” against testing; we have to find a way to say “no” as visibly and collectively as possible.
I see this rejection grounded in pure common sense, and I continue to believe it is obvious enough that we, with all our smarts, will get it right yet.
In part 2 of this 874-part series, to appear occasionally in this space, we’ll explore the absurdity of our educational crisis in America when we base our circle-the-wagons mentality on the fact that U.S. standardized test scores are lower than the scores in totalitarian nations. (Hint: Those nations are good at getting people to do exactly what they’re told.) Part 3 will demonstrate how your marriage or long-term relationship is probably no longer federally fundable because it fails criteria established by a national standardization measure of relationship bliss. Unless you’re one of those people who read from the bottom up, you know about part 4 already.
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Here’s how it works. Require children to spend much of each day at an official training center called a school. There, always tell them they have just a few options — A, B, C, or D — only one of which is “right.” Do this for 10 or 12 years. Then, when facing a decision, the educated (that is, conditioned) adults will look for a brief menu of choices that someone higher up has offered. Only one answer will be accepted. And don’t spend too long thinking about it! You’ll lose points!
I’m a fifth grade teacher. My students and I are shackled and held hostage by standardized testing. Test scores “go up” because school districts become increasingly savvy on how to “beat the test.” Millions of dollars are spent on test prep materials. Do the results really show that students are improving? What are we sacrificing? Teacher creativity! I can’t have a teachable moment if it isn’t centered around the state’s core content standards. Every spring I did a play that was historical and centered around the information the students learned in our social studies curriculum. The students wrote the script, chose the music and choreographed the dance moves. It was always a blast! I believed it was an engaging activity that incorporated the history curriculum. This activity was time consuming and I was told that I had to stop because I needed to spend the month before “the test” reviewing the core content standards in the test prep workbooks. The students probably did perform better after sitting in their desks for hours doing page after page of “sample questions.” However, we were all bored and what skills did they really learn? I know we need to measure student performance but there has to be a better way. Teaching is an art. Learning is a gift.
The torturous month leading up to standardized testing drains my kids of a crucial element in their lifelong well-being: The simple enjoyment of learning new stuff in fun ways. Cathy’s recount (above) is a perfect example of why standardized testing gets in the way of real learning.
What you’re talking about is assessment pried apart from learning. I have an example from last week this is still blowing my mind; my son with Down Syndrome completed (with my help) a homework assignment (that he couldn’t understand) and couldn’t fit his words in the small boxes (clearly not created for someone with small motor issues); his special education teacher corrected/rewrote the words next to the boxes in red ink. Perhaps if I tell you that my son can’t read, and does not understand the red ink means “correction” you’ll see where I’m heading. A stylized form of educational communication (red ink, corrections) was used to respond to a student who did not know how to read the language; in essence, the corrections could have been farsi or toddler scribbles. They communicated the same amount. But the teacher felt she had done her job. . .and I, as a parent, was meant to feel the same, I suppose. Kuhn talks about our inability to see outside of the prevailing paradigm; it’s time for an educational paradigm shift that puts real assessment (and real assessment is founded on very basic queries: what are our goals? are we reaching them?) back in the driver’s seat.
I started with a response, and I realized my frustration and discontentment with our education “system” was going to come through as a bitter, cynical, hopeless ramble.
So I will just say that I agree with those who think that this nation’s inept, unaccountable education machine is contributing greatly to a physically unfit, underthinking society with a narrow world view and delusional historical perpsective.
Someone did say that…didn’t they?
As someone who loves and excels at standardized tests I am crushed!
But I am very aware of how badly they are misused in our school systems. Since I am good at them, I don’t want to see them go away completely. Maybe I need to start a company to provide them to weirdos like myself… :)
On the opposite end, my 12 year old son sees the lunacy surrounding the current testing system but we both had the same question for the university soliciting essay answers. Won’t someone just pay someone else to write the answers?
Scott,
You missed the boat on this one. When you discuss the group of people that profit from it, you should also look at the group of people that are opposed to it and you’ll find the NEA, the NJEA, basically all of the groups that do not want accountabiltiy in the schools.
When you discuss filling bubbles and teaching to the test, you are also off-base. The tests in NJ are based upon a core curriculum. If you are teaching to the test, you are teaching the curriculum which is a good thing.
Do the standardized tests identify everyone who will succeed? No, but are very accurate. If I graduate from Drexel with a 4.0, I’m more likely to succeed than the graduate with a 3.0, The 4.0 indicates that I studied harder, understood the material better, and did well on tests. It does not indicate creativity, social skills, and other things that I’ll to succeed but in general, the 4.0 will beat the 3.0 just as the 1500 on the SATs will beat the 1100 student.
Ingar — It is interesting that the thing that you point out as unrepresented by standardized testting or GPA is the highest level of Bloom’s (revised) taxonomy: creativity. I think Scott’s point isn’t that the tests are worthless but that they are now percieved as a summation of an individual’s abilites and potential, even if they were not originally meant to.
And, on a general plane, some of the tests are horrible. I’d love to see a room full of graduate students take the AP English test, for instance, and do well without having had a teacher prepare them for taking the test. (I think it is a horrible test.) That said, as a trained SAT prep teacher, I have spent an hour with particular students who were stalled with their SAT scores. After one session, most of them have had a significant increase — many by a hundred points or more. What did I teach them? Test taking strategies — procedures. Something’s wrong with that picture. They had the content knowledge, but it took a “how to take the test” session to allow them to prove it.