Blog: FCAR Speakout

21 not-yet-answered questions about standardized testing

*By Marion Brady

January 26, 2003

"You can't fatten a pig by weighing it."

So goes an old saying. You can, however, find out how well the pig is faring on what it's being fed. This is the logic behind the important role standardized testing is playing in the current push to improve American education.

The basic reform strategy promoted by the business community and the last three national administrations is simple. First, put pressure on the fifty states to write education "standards." Second, test to find out how well the standards are being met. Third, rank schools based on the test scores. Fourth, reward the good performers and come down hard on the poor performers.

This commonsense approach to reform appears to be working. It's wildly popular with the general public, politicians have discovered that, as a vote-getter, the phrase "standards and accountability" ranks right up there with waving the flag and pledging no new taxes, and, yes, average test scores are up slightly.
 

Do not rejoice. The long-term effects of this "reform" will devastate the young, and therefore America.
 

Disaster is inevitable. And for a relatively simple reason. Policy makers think educating is about math, science, language arts and social studies. It isn't. School subjects are just convenient organizers of information. As all effective teachers know, the real challenge isn't to stuff kids' heads with secondhand information, but to teach them to think-to draw inferences, generate hypotheses, formulate generalizations, explore systemic relationships, make defensible value judgments, and so on.

Obviously, if the main aim of education is to teach students to think-to infer, hypothesize, generalize, value, and synthesize-then what standardized tests should measure are differences in the quality of student inferences, hypotheses, generalizations, value judgments and syntheses.

That's what standardized tests should measure. But they don't. There's only one thought process that standardized, machine-gradable tests can measure with absolute precision: student recall of secondhand information. Period. That's useful, of course, but it has little to do with how well students think.
 

What's to be done? With both political parties solidly behind the "No Child Left Behind" legislation, maybe it's too late to do anything. Here and there around the country, however, perceptive citizens are beginning to ask questions: Should the test tail wag the education dog? What are the consequences of focusing on minimum achievement rather than on maximum performance? Are market forces the educational cure-all their advocates believe them to be? How ethical is it for the sellers of standardized tests to peddle test prep materials for those same tests? How wise is it to put the thought processes of the young in the hands of a few corporate lobbyists?
 

More questions: What of importance do standardized tests predict? How accurately? Should the inevitable cultural biases in such tests simply be ignored? Do vomit-inducing test days affect the development of a long-term love of learning? Is it harmful to attach the blanket "failing" label to schools? To every teacher and student in those schools? What should be the fate of obviously smart kids who don't perform well under test conditions? Given every standardized test's wide margin of error, how fair is a rigid cut-off score? What are the unanalyzed costs of replacing free time, physical conditioning, music, art, drama and other similar activity with test prep exercises? And more questions: Is too much weight being placed on student ability merely to manipulate language? What alternative paths to development are open to students who think in non-standard, innovative ways? What should be done when errors in the grading of high-stakes tests come to light after life-changing consequences have been suffered? Where in the testing program is provision made for multiple intelligences? Why do "standards" and "accountability" ignore the integrated nature of knowledge? And Question #20: What explains the public's willingness to buy Washington's superficial definition of educational accountability?

These are questions thoughtful citizens are beginning to ask. Here's the big one: Should the course of American education be set by crude tests capable of measuring only simple, low-order thought
processes?

It's possible that the question askers will eventually form a critical mass and begin attracting political leadership. If you're conservative enough to think that locally and democratically controlled public education is a good thing, pray for that. Hard.
 

*First published in the Orlando Sentinel.  Posted here with permission of the author.

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Last modified: 06/15/08