Standardized Testing During a Pandemic? Bring ’em On!
It’s not a popular idea, but testing students this spring might be what it finally takes to show how worthless the whole enterprise is.
No one ever wants to give a standardized test in school. I can’t think of one colleague who rejoices in slapping that bubble sheet down in front of a kid. And the tears from an eight-year-old who can’t read yet? They can be heartbreaking.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden promised to end the use of standardized testing in our nation’s schools, much to the relief of educators. Then, on February 22, came the announcement that no schools would receive waivers for this year’s state tests, prompting a national outcry among unions and parents alike.
However much we hate these exams intruding in our children’s education, I am hopeful that this could be the year that snaps school leaders out of their thrall with high-stakes testing. The year that proves what classroom teachers have known all along and administrators are reluctant to admit: that standardized testing is a big, profit-driven farce and a waste of everybody’s time.
Ah, but the data. We need it, don’t we? Perhaps, but only if we don’t trust our teachers to know what the heck is going on in their own classrooms. But the data is unbiased! It is objective information, free of the spin that teachers no doubt put on their own students’ accomplishments.
There are few things less objective in this world than a standardized test.
Standardized tests have been around, in one form or another, for over a century. The Army started using them during World War I when Louis Terman and his fellows from the American Psychological Association were recruited to make group intelligence tests. It was already standard practice for the military to give Army Mental Tests to determine the aptitude of soldiers for certain types of jobs.
Later in 1918, one of the first standardized tests for children, the Stanford-Binet, was given to over 6,500 children. By the end of 1918, over one hundred standardized tests were in use, some including a multiple-choice format created by one of Terman’s former students, Arthur Otis.
Standardized testing is a big, profit-driven farce and a waste of everybody’s time.
Fast forward to today and you see a standardized testing culture run amok. When the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act set a ludicrous goal of every single child achieving proficiency on state standardized tests by 2014, the stakes had never been higher for schools and teachers. This goal was wrong-headed for a number of reasons, mainly for narrowing the curriculum to a single point of emphasis: the testable skills on a standardized exam.
Not much has changed. Although the proficiency goal was dropped in later legislation, schools today are still tagged with a scarlet letter if they fail to meet adequate growth goals. If the failures persist, they are required to use up to 7% of their coveted Title I funds to address the issue, a significant percentage for cash-strapped districts. Further, many teachers even lost their jobs due to high-stakes test scores, despite the known volatility in the so-called value-added measures (VAM) used to rate teachers.
High-stakes tests have turned into a cottage industry of blame, a tool for politicians and administrators to root out apparent sources of negligence in their schools. If anything, these exams have stratified schools even further, preventing real reform from taking shape, such as adequate school funding for high-needs districts, smaller class sizes, and time for arts and play.
If only the data from high-stakes tests help teachers do a better job. Alas, they do not. If anything, the time spent on prepping students for the test wastes many hours of precious learning time, which would be better spent on critical literacy skills, financial and time management skills, a sound knowledge of basic history, and much, much more.
It is certainly the business of schools to teach students how to read and write proficiently. In my estimation, they are the most important skills we teach. But a standardized test is a game of wits. It’s no secret by now that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds outperform students from impoverished families. There are many reasons for this, including exposure to more intellectually nourishing books and a broader vocabulary at home. In fact, when it comes to SAT scores…
… data shows that students from families making less than $20,000/year averaged a combined score of 1,326 compared to 1,714 points for students from families making more than $200,000/year (College Board).
Students aren’t the only ones punished by testing. The burden on teachers can’t be overstated. According to a study done by The Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives at SUNY New Paltz, testing time in the 2014–2015 school year consumed 1,110 minutes for students in Grades 3–6 and 1,134 minutes for students in Grades 7–8 or approximately 19 hours of school time. As any teacher would likely tell you, however, this is a massive miscalculation, as the study did not take into account test practice or any of the other activities that go into preparing children for a high-stakes exam. And despite all this effort, there is no guarantee of success, since individual teachers account for as little as 15% of a student’s standardized test score.
Still, the irrational march to “scientifically” measure a child’s education goes on. States this year will give the PARCC, Smarter Balanced, or some other corporate-designed exam. Parents began revolting against this political and corporate grift in education as early as 2011 when United Opt Out organized a Facebook page, a website with over 50 opt-out guides, a variety of parent resource guides, and an e-mail address for direct contact with families. By 2016, many states had high annual opt-out rates, prompting push-back by state governments. Despite some compromises to the testing format introduced in places like New York State, the epicenter of the opt-out movement, the madness of measurement continues to grip public schools with a plague-like intensity.
Despite these drawbacks, let’s give the tests this spring a chance. Let’s put the same time and energy into them as we always do — or as much as we can muster given the circumstances of the pandemic. All schools were impacted equally by early closings last year and varying levels of engagement this year. If the research holds true, and I believe it will, the results from this spring’s test will continue to skew toward students of a higher socioeconomic status.
When it does, this blatantly obvious bias will — or should — sound the death knell for annual high-stakes tests. It will reveal that no matter how much or how little time students spend in school, standardized tests are only useful in showing whose parents have the highest-paying jobs. There would be no further debate on this, no logical reason to continue the farce any longer. Schools could then begin to not only reform but revolutionize school into something it is not today…hubs of learning focused on students’ passions as their prime directive, while embedding truly useful twenty-first century skills and knowledge.
Mr. Terman, thank you for your services. We’ll take it from here.
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