To Test or Not to Test?
I have always been an excellent student, but standardized tests have never captured my abilities. When I was young, my parents taught me to value my education. To do this, society forced me to work harder than many of my peers. Like thousands of other minority students of the past and present, America wronged me.
I grew up in a failing school district with battered textbooks, ill-trained teachers, and chaotic classrooms. Each year the amount of disciplinary distractions outweighed the amount of formal instruction, and each year I dreaded the phrase “Testing Week.”
From the first day of school until test day, we constantly prepped. Once the hell-week passed, we anxiously awaited the test scores. When the scores arrived, those of who passed could finally breathe, but we were only rewarded with getting to relive the life-draining cycle the next year.
Fed up with this on-ramp of standardized testing, parents are changing the status-quo. They are choosing to keep their students home on test day. It is called the Opt-Out Movement.
In 1983, President Ronald Regan was handed a troubling report called, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. The report revealed that America desperately needed to find a way to increase their academic standards. In 2002, President George W. Bush faced the same dilemma; The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was his solution. NCLB updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and empowered the federal government to play a larger role in K-12 policy. Since ESEA’s original passage in 1965, the government’s voice in public education policy has gotten louder with every reauthorization. Under NCLB, the federal government was given the green light to start holding schools accountable for student outcomes.
NCLB sought to close the achievement gap separating low- income, minority students from opportunity. The goal was noble but far from simple to achieve. The law mandated every state to administer a reading, math, and science test to all its students in grades 3–8 and 10. Gaining 381 out of 435 votes in the House and 87 out of 100 votes in the Senate, NCLB was largely supported by Republicans, Democrats, civil rights activists, and business leaders. It is hard to believe a law passed with overwhelming, bipartisan support would prompt a national debate lasting more than a decade. The words “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), however, could be to blame.
Every year schools are required to report their test results, and the AYP tracks their performance compared to grade-level standards. Schools that consecutively fail to meet their goals face serious federal sanctions, such as being mandated to offer free tutoring and forced to submit to state take-over and school shut-down. Because of this, standardized testing turned into high-stakes achievement testing. Some teachers were threatened with job loss, and students faced retention for failing. Critics claim this relentless pressure to do well on the test sparked widespread cheating scandals and ultimately disadvantaged students.
In 2008, President Obama’s campaign promised change, but his education initiatives still did not appease test opponents. Critics argued that his Race to the Top program, which allowed states to compete for $4.35 billion in extra funding for strong test scores, perpetuated the flawed teach-to-test culture. After years of constant testing — and, some say, less learning — parents have had enough.
Last year, more than 200,000 students in New York State refused to take the state-administered reading and math test. And members of the opt-out movement claim New York was just the tip of the iceberg. They believe the current style of schooling cheats students out of a quality education, and their calls for change reached the highest echelon of elected officials. President Obama himself recently conceded that his Race to the Top polices were causing students to be over-tested, and he publicly apologized for “taking the joy out of teaching and learning.” His acknowledgement combined with the parents’ momentum laid the groundwork for a major shift in U.S. education policy.
On December 10, 2015, the typically polarized Congress came together to remedy their ills and the mistakes of their predecessors. President Obama signed the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which finally replaced NCLB. The new law rolled back the federal government’s role in setting accountability standards and clarified that parents have the right to refuse the test. Because of this, more and more parents are now adopting the opt-out battle-cry. They believe excessive testing takes up valuable class time, while forcing students to adapt to a one-size-fits-all curriculum. What’s more, they claim low-income, minority, English learners, and students with disabilities suffer the most from these high stakes tests. These groups of students are more likely to be retained in a grade, denied the opportunity to graduate, or placed in remedial education programs.
More than twenty civil rights groups, however, have signed a letter petitioning the Department of Education to keep testing. They argue the government cannot fix the broken education system if they cannot measure it. “Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, “for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year.” These advocates do not trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged students if they are not required to test and publicly display scores. They believe assessments play a crucial role in holding schools and educators accountable. A product of a failing school system, I am sympathetic to their plea. But, as someone who has actually lived what it currently takes to overcome systematic inequality, I can confidently say that the excessive standardized testing made my attempt to eliminate the preparation-gap all the more difficult. Therefore, the debate about standardized testing continues. This year, will your child take the test or opt out?
