Is testing is the ONLY measure of a child’s success in life? John Holt in How Children Fail said, ” The major difference between the good student and the poor one in our schools is that the poor student forgets right away while the good one is careful to wait until after the examination.” Teachers teach to test results, to achieve national test score standings (in order to receive more funding dollars from the government), to herd children into results rather than for the sake learning. “We may end up with a generation whose heads are full of little bits and scraps of knowledge and who are adept at picking from (a), (b), or (c) but who are unable to write, express, think or persuade,” says Rober Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers.
Testing is America’s way for legitimizing spending $300 billion a year in our schools. This way, citizens know where their tax dollars are going. Or do they? Teachers and administrators support testing because the results supposedly give an accurate picture a given school, district, country, nation is doing (better than what?)
Also, test results supposedly convey the status of minority children being denied equal opportunities. There are some underlying irregularities with this notion. One is that standardized tests are culturally biased towards white children, mostly boys. Second, tests do not reflect the true picture of a minority student. For example, in the Philadelphia school system, there are at least 100 different languages spoken by students. Further investigation reveals that the students are children of the large numbers of foreign exchange students who attend the many universities there. In the country of their birth, these young children were among the most talented and intelligent in their schools. Because the number of bilingual teachers for these dialects is non-existent, the children lacking English speaking skills, are placed in ‘special need and handicapped’ classes. In a Here, the student is equal to the students at the bottom end of the standards spectrum. High intelligence plus boredom equals delinquents. With parents speaking little English and without knowledge of the educational infreastructures in the US, these bright, intelligent students from foreign countries are often lost in the maze of conglomerate school systems.
Albert Shanker sums up tests best in six points:
1) “Since the reputation of a school, its principal, its teachers and the school board and superintendent depends largely on these test scores, schools are devoting less time to reading real books, writing essays and discussing current events and more and more time teaching youths to fill in blanks and choose the right answer in multiple choice questions. This destroys much of the value of tests, which only tell you something if they have independent measure of what the student knows. The usual test for blood pressure is good only when the patient has not taken medicine designed to lower his blood pressure before the test.”
2) School districts are now in the process of “curriculum alignment”. That means that course content, textbooks, lesson plans, are all geared to items that will be on the test. These tests only tap a sample of skills, so its possible for youths to do well and still not be able to read a book. But since there is only so much time, schools now minimize or totally leave out those things that are not on these tests. This is a tail wagging the dog. Schools and teachers should not be pressured to drop content they believe to be valuable just because it won’t be on the test.
3) The tests are very costly in terms of time and money. Coaching and testing time has increased so much that it is significantly taking away blocks of time from teaching and learning. The money spent for the tests could be put to better use for adequate textbooks and materials.
4) The test scores published by schools and districts are misleading, if not downright fraudulent. Dr. John Jacob Cannell, president of Friends for Education, recently discovered that most states and school districts are ‘above average’. This makes people feel good about their schools when maybe they should not. They just mean the words ‘above average’ are being used in a special way. Little do you know that the way, which the testing companies and school districts use the words everyone could be on the top half. If the function of tests is to give the public a truthful picture of where schools stand in comparison with others, it is just not being fulfilled.
5) Students who take tests are not being judged against their peers, but against norm groups who took the test as much as 3 to 10 years earlier. Neither do the test score reports tell whether a district is doing better or worse than last year. Test companies provide school districts use different kinds of norms. For example, it seems that school districts can make themselves look good by using norms from low-achieving districts. Or they can show improvement if they compare themselves with high achieving districts one year and low-achieving districts the next. There is no requirement that the public be informed about any of these practices.
6) A brief look at some of the tests given 10 to 20 years ago and those used today suggests that we may not be able to tell how well students today compare with those of the past because some of the tests, like the textbooks, have been made EASIER”.
If all students took tests and all had to accept the grade for the entire class, perhaps more co-operation instead of competition would prevail (if tests had to be given at all). Testing does not measure a child’s intelligence or creativity. Tests have never been found to measure career success. According to recent surveys conducted by Phi Delta Kappa (2000) and others (Campbell 1999, Cizek 1999, Daves, 1984, Haney 1993), the singularity of test scores does not measure a child’s ability to succeed. Rather, a combination of factors weighs far greater in evaluating performance. And if a teacher should decide to ask open ended questions on a test, with the number of students seen in a day, grading papers would be an endless task. Yet, open-ended questions are most likely to reveal a student who has mastered the subject matter. According to Skinner’s Operant Conditioning theory asking a child what they know about a subject has far greater value than asking what they do not know!
What is the purpose of testing? Testing is a tool, a measure, yardstick to measure the areas of expertise deemed by educational institutions as important. According to the latest research from the cognitive sciences, standardized testing is a diagnostic and prescriptive tool devised to measure particular computation and symbolic manipulation skills. The information in testing does not enable the learner to distinguish real understating from ‘literal’. Tests cannot measure the content of the human mind or meaning, just as implementing instruction does not guarantee learning. (Crowell 1992, 1999, Allen 1998, Archbald 1988,).
Tests are often used as instruments of degradation, humiliation and punishment. The Pennsylvania Empowerment Act designated the PSSA as the sole measurement tool for assessing the success or failure of a school. There is a growing movement to rank schools nationwide by state test scores as the 1999 edition of Education Week suggests. Adding to this, PSSA test 1) results return too late to be useful 2) do not measure student performance 3) are scored by individuals who do not have knowledge of the community or the children being tested 4) and, as a High Stakes tool, add a component of risk. Further research reveals that several school districts across the nation alter results to ‘meet the scores’ and pressure demands. (Newsweek July 2000)
Edward White of California State University stated that there are two choices with regards to testing; ‘we can ignore them in the vain hope that they will go away or we can participate in them in an informed way to make them as good as possible’. Tests like the Iowa or Terra Nova enable each district a different measurement tool determined by local community needs.
Schools are ‘damsels in distress’, with experts in psychology, psychiatry, business and industry, government cast as her saviors. However, the profit margins of the testing industry that maintains the crisis as well as the cultural distrust of teachers through clever marketing strategies and business acumen. This distrust is carefully nurtured: remote ‘experts’ develop educational tests and prepackaged curricula and send them off to school administrators, who ensure that teachers faithfully execute the plan. Students are thus shaped to the specifications of experts whom they will never meet and who may have never set foot in a classroom. And of course, holding students accountable will require an enormous amount of standardized tests. The ‘testing industry’ last year, claimed $60 billion dollars in profits.
In the area of accountability, there is irony. While teachers and schools are being held hyper-accountable, the ‘experts’ in the assessment industry are given carte blanche: a nearly unfettered marketplace, very few governmental restrictions and the ‘right’ to protect what they consider to be proprietary information. In 1979, Senator Kenneth LaVelle introduced a bill to regulate the industry: “The testing industry has shrouded itself in a mantle of secrecy that leaves it unaccountable to the public who should be able to independently assess the accuracy and validity of its product.” This is truly remarkable in an age in which accountability is the crucial force. It is difficult to imagine the public response to a school that tried to cut off ‘freedom of information’ in this way.
The argument used to continue testing is to protect the ‘integrity’, ‘objectivity’ or ‘fairness’ of the tests. But in reality, this practice shields the industry from public exposure. If we begin to hold testing companies accountable for THEIR work, the industry would not hold up to the scrutiny. Such as it is with the secrecy around the PSSA .
Peter Johnston stated that ‘constructive assessment’ is possible only through collective, local effort with those who have direct contact with children daily. Common sense dictates that standard tests are objective means for holding schools accountable. In reality, a fair minded and just concept of accountability begins with a clear sense of who is accountable, to whom and for what. Schools must be accountable not to corporate entities, remote educational experts or some restless national audience created by mass media, but rather to their local communities.
This also means that communities must be held accountable to schools. Accountability is not a one-way street. And schools must not be pitted against their communities. In fact, a clearer understanding of schools as part of their communities is necessary. Too often, schools are somehow seen as islands unto themselves. For the most part, schools are comprised of community members.
The change in education must begin, not just from the top down but from inside out. States are usually large and extremely diversified, ranging from the rural agrarian populations to the overcrowded cities. Testing does not solve the problems of every school district. Rather the school is a reflection of the community in which it resides. The Cleveland School District reached out to the community, business and local government to alter its educational structure. The state of Nebraska designs its testing instruments locally through a joint venture of teachers, community leaders, parents and administrators. If a national test is the sole standard of measuring, schools like Reading School District with a 58% migrant population would be devastated. In the state of Pennsylvania, how can one test measure the understanding and knowledge of a child in the poverty communities of the Philadelphia, the transient Hispanic population of Reading and the middle-upper middle class suburbs of Dallas? The real assessment ‘experts’, the local communities and their teachers have been grossly underestimated. Only local school districts can determine the needs of their local communities and must be allowed to do so.
Are student test scores to be made accountable for unprepared teachers and fluctuating professional populations? The dwindling population of professional educators shadows the issue of student assessment. The Williamsport School District spent over a year in their nation wide search to find applicants to respond for their Superintendents position in the 1990’s. This is a common problem among all schools for all positions across the US (PESSA Principalship 2000). The education profession is not valued and the shortages are mirroring public sentiment. The inevitable solutions are to execute emergency certificates for warm bodies to hold lessons for expanding or high-risk school systems. What effect does this have on student learning and testing? What is happening in these classrooms? The majority of public school districts do not live in the Utopia that exists in the Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania that spends $68,000 per child in a sheltered, live-in, controlled environment.