Common Ground: Everyone Seems To Agree That High-Stakes Testing Sucks
By Jennifer Wagner
ANOTHER TAKE: Maybe high-stakes tests aren’t the right way to go, but what if they’re telling us the painful truth about student performance? Our CEO Robert Enlow plays devil’s advocate in this piece.
The great state of Indiana, where EdChoice is headquartered, recently released scores from ILEARN, its brand-new, $45 million statewide standardized test.
The results were downright awful, with fewer than half of all third- through eighth-graders in the state deemed proficient in math and English.
Parents, educators and elected officials were understandably outraged. After all, school and district letter grades, teacher pay, federal funding and state intervention all hinge on these scores — not to mention the effect on students who thought they were otherwise doing just fine in school.
“I didn’t want him to think that he was a failure,” said one mom of a Central Indiana sixth-grader who chose not to share her son’s scores with him.
“Any educator who’s taken a testing class or measurement class…should know that if you have a test where the majority of people are failing, there’s something wrong, and it’s usually something wrong with the test,” said one Southern Indiana elementary school principal.
The outcry prompted a nearly immediate call for lawmakers to implement a “hold harmless” provision to prevent negative consequences from the test. They probably will. But the damage of yet another high-stakes test gone wrong goes far beyond one year of bad scores.
I used to be a big proponent of testing and accountability because I didn’t truly understand the difference between assessment as a tool for student improvement (what I grew up with) and assessment as a stick to punish teachers and pit schools against each other (what has become reality under federal testing mandates).
To be clear, I don’t hate testing — and the neither does the general public. The chart below shows the latest EdNext polling on the issue:
But there’s less agreement when it comes to using those test scores to evaluate teachers or grade schools. This year’s PDK/Gallup poll shows that almost all educators and a large majority of parents believe that improvement over time, not the percentage of students who pass a test, is the best way to measure school performance.
As Indiana debates what to do with its current testing conundrum, other states are taking steps to roll back the emphasis on testing.
In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper recently signed the “Testing Reduction Act of 2019” to eliminate more than 20 state exams and reduce the number of tests students take.
On her third day in office, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a pair of executive orders to replace the state’s standardized testing system and remove it from teacher evaluations.
When it comes to the choice movement, high-stakes testing may present a unique opportunity to find common ground with folks who aren’t always supportive of private school choice but who don’t want to see students and educators under so much pressure.
It’s true that in some states, including Indiana, students enrolled using private school choice programs must take the state-mandated test, but we at EdChoice advocate for a broader standard that allows schools to determine how they assess their students — often using what’s called a nationally norm-referenced test that’s designed to compare and rank test-takers with respect to one another.
In other words, the tests we all took as kids, which were designed to help our teachers know where we were doing well and where we needed to improve.
While we’ll probably never see eye-to-eye with opponents on school funding or other types of regulations, it feels like there’s an alliance to be made on this issue, especially as well intentioned tests like ILEARN turn into taxpayer-funded disasters on the front page.
Jennifer Wagner is a mom, a recovering political hack and the Vice President of Communications for EdChoice, a national nonprofit that supports and promotes universal school choice.
