MYTH: Testing is a valid and reliable indicator of learning. Schools should focus only on results of standardized testing. An emphasis on testing will ensure a higher standard of learning for the children.
Benjamin Franklin once said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That is exactly what we are seeing in the schools today on many levels. If throwing money at a problem does not solve the problem, policy makers invariably believe that throwing more money at it will make it better. If regulations prove ineffective, the prevailing approach is to add more regulations. Schools are held hostage by a group of radicals that came of age in the 1960s and refuse to abandon their favorite issues even when evidence overwhelmingly proves these ideas to be clunkers. Insanity.
When SAT and ACT scores began to decline in the 1960s, policy makers (note: not educators) grew concerned and felt that something should be done. By the 1970s there was a school reform movement that advocated minimum competency testing for high school graduation. A set of standards was defined that represented the basic educational requirements necessary for minimum functional participation in the society. Tests were promptly designed and administered. By the early 1980s, the flaws in this approach began to emerge. It appeared that minimum competency was dumbing down the curriculum. For students, as long as only the minimums were required for graduation, there was not much sense in learning more than was needed. Nor was there a need for teachers to teach more than was required by the tests.
In 1983, National Commission on Education released A Nation At Risk. The report recommended an end to minimum competency testing and called for tougher standards. It was generally perceived that American education was failing and that the U.S. would loose its preeminent global position. Citing loses in international test scores and deteriorating conditions in the schools, the Commission provoked hysteria among the public. It effectively argued that states should implement high standards, improved curricula, and tough assessments, and hold schools accountable for meeting the standards. Thus was born the testing movement that preoccupies educators and the schools today.
Daniel Koretz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education says that “tests are cheap and very powerful and have an aura of objectivity.” Testing seems like a good idea. But along with testing comes a plethora of predicaments and problems. Not satisfied with merely imposing standardized tests on the schools, policy makers and other special interest groups (not educators) added “incentives” to the mix. In the typical seems-to-make-sense ideology of the left, it was claimed that incentives for learning and sanctions for poor performance would improve the schools.
With the addition of incentives and sanctions standardized testing has evolved into high-stakes testing with punishments imposed at a rate two to three times that of rewards. Forty-five states hold schools accountable for poor performance. Twenty-seven use ranking or rating systems. Sixteen can fire teachers and administrators, while 14 states have the authority to take over schools that fail to perform. Eleven states can revoke a school’s accreditation. In contrast, only 22 states offer incentives to top performing schools.
Teachers and schools have long been viewed as ineffective, if not completely incompetent, by the general public. This view has been promoted by progressive types who would use the schools to advance their agenda. These same progressives have tampered with the schools for the last several decades and have had a serious impact upon educational policy. They have created the very problems that they now point out as weaknesses and failures. For these groups there is a desperate need to draw attention away from their shortcomings as pedagogical experts. The punitive aspects associated with high stakes testing appear to offer these groups a certain satisfaction. The sanctions are intended to force the schools and teachers to improve or else. The testing movement is a way for the liberals to hold schools accountable for declining academic outcomes.
In New York, for example, the State Board of Regents, made up of politicians and business leaders, resolved that the schools were failing badly. They determined that the only way to improve the schools was to improve the test scores. So they passed legislation that mandated high stakes testing. The results were dismal. To prepare students for the test, the curriculum was altered to be more in line with the tests, and daily drills were begun. During this time, failure and dropout rates increased while there was a noted increase (22%) in the number of “special education” diplomas. As a means to disguise the dropout rates, students were placed in General Education Development (GED) programs.
As these dismal results were reported to the board of regents, their response was to add more layers of requirements. Still, the damage continued. Despite the fact that none of the regents ever had any teaching experience, they determined that they knew the best way to improve education.
In 1999, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) stated that “high stakes tests often fail to assess accurately students’ knowledge, understanding, and capability. Raising test scores does not improve education.” The problem is that high stakes testing forces schools to teach to the tests. When schools are forced to focus on testing, memorization of facts are emphasized over the development of problem solving, critical and analytical thinking skills. With pressure to show positive results, schools, administrators, and teachers tend to narrow their focus as they sink into survival mode.
High stakes standardized testing has not proved to be a valid indicator of learning. This form of testing only proves that students can be trained to select answers from a list. On reading tests, for example, drill and practice tests have succeeded in raising the passing rate of students on reading tests, but many of the same students are unable to apply those skills to actual reading. In the middle grades, teachers have reported that students who pass reading tests have grown accustomed to responding to the short passages on the tests and have difficulty with lengthier reading assignments. Furthermore, some students are unable to apply reading skills to other academic areas, despite success with reading tests. Is it any wonder that scores continue to rise while minimum abilities of graduates decline?
As for the tests themselves, cheating and manipulation is not uncommon. Editor in Chief of The American Enterprise, Karl Zinsmeister, writes of one school on Staten Island. When parents complained, “the Board of Education’s Office of Special Investigations uncovered wide spread cheating at School 5, but not by sneaky students. The school’s principal (had) altered answer sheets.”
In Birmingham, Alabama, 522 low performing high school students were expelled shortly before a district wide SAT test was scheduled. Susan Ohanian, a Senior Fellow at the Vermont Society for the Study of Education, said of the Birmingham 522, “the easiest way to raise the scores is to make sure the bottom students don’t take the test.” Could it have been mere coincidence that the Birmingham schools superintendent was given a bonus when test scores went up?
A study by Arizona State University was conducted to determine if testing indicated any transference of knowledge “beyond what was required to perform on...high-stakes test(s).” In light of increasing test scores, the findings revealed that “there is little support in these data that such increases are anything but the result of test preparation.” The study also found that “high-stakes testing programs have unintended consequences such as a narrowing of the curriculum, heavy use of drill as the method of instruction, increased student drop-out rates, teachers and schools cheating on the exams, and teachers’ defection from the profession.”
The NCTE also stated that “high stakes testing often harms students’ daily experience of learning, displaces more thoughtful and creative curriculum, diminishes the emotional well-being of educators and children and unfairly damages the life-chances of members of vulnerable groups.” In short, standardized, high stakes testing is not working.
As authors of the ASU study, Audry Amrein and David Berliner, stated, “the harder teachers work to directly prepare students for a high-stakes test, the less likely the test will be valid for the purposes it was intended.” Public Education today is like a vast Rube Goldberg machine: all bells, whistles, and moving parts. It appears to be accomplishing something, but the end product is disproportionate to the amount of energy and resources expended.
The sad irony of high stakes testing is that there is a group intimately involved with education that is rarely, if ever, consulted regarding school improvement issues. Yet, this group almost always receives the blame when the innovative programs fail to deliver as promised. This group? It is the teachers. The teachers provide a convenient scapegoat for the progressives that seek to manipulate the schools. But, it is not the teachers who are to blame. Forty years of liberal manipulation is the real cause of declining academic outcomes. High stakes testing is merely the current hysteria promoted by the left.
