It is difficult for people to move forward. They prefer to stand still, jogging from one foot to the other, step back and finally turn forward again.
In schools, a million excuses are made. Whether accountability, reform, transform, high-achiever vs. low-performer, second language learner, charter, private, parochial, public, and etc., the list attached contains all the reasons to stick with that justification, telling why it is wrong or why it will solve all educational problems.
This week the word is “test.” How well a student performs on a test has been a criterion for success K-12 since Sputnik soared into the heavens. You may laugh because you know someone who didn’t do well on tests, but who has done very well in the market place. You may smirk because someone did well on tests, but not in the work place. And everything in between. And you were surprised as a high school high-achieving senior when the counselor said “don’t worry about it.”
Nowadays, however, no matter what kind of school, the students, teachers, administrators worry about success and the test is how the public knows. It sounded good in 2002 when No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), was instituted, even though teacher’s unions were warning against testing requirements and benchmarks even then.
The education world was in the middle of facing the research that showed a number of schools in each large district were stumbling, not graduating students with ambition to go to college, in fact not graduating enough students overall, leaving African-American and Hispanic students in the dust and making them repeat a grade or subject if they didn’t drop out in disgust.
Testing became the way to assess how schools were doing. Anyone in charge of supervising the testing knew that it didn’t matter how relentless you were in helping students improve. In several years the benchmarks were going to overtake the schools, even if most groups attained the minimum proficiency except one, eg. special education. Most educators would say it is because the NCLB legislation treated students as robots, all were going to do well and improve as long as the “test” was given. And if they didn’t it was the teacher’s fault.
Opposition from two well-respected organizations, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA), as well as other groups at the state level have shown that transformation doesn’t occur by looking at scores on standardized tests, not even on criterion-referenced tests as is touted in California. In addition, major publishers of school texts make money from interim tests that are supposed to show the teacher how well students have learned so far. No studies have been made to show that those tests help, not even as practice for the kinds of questions asked on yearly exams.
Adults love tests. Good students don’t mind taking them, confident that they will pass well. Some high school students cavalierly fill in bubbles, no longer impressed by tests. Students who don’t read English, and are still required to take the exams, fill in the bubbles and close the booklet.
Tests need to be revised now that Common Core Standards have been instituted. Let’s hope the tests are short, ask competent questions, and are used only as one source of information to guide a school and district to transform a low-performing into a high-achieving school, to make sure those students graduate with the skills to attend a college or other post-secondary school.