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Pay attention: Standardized tests are destroying education, part 1 (of 874)

Posted By Scott Warnock On In education,virtual children by Scott Warnock | 8 Comments

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 [1]? 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 [2], 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 [3]. 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 [4], 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 [5], 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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Scott Warnock [9]

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.
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