I’m seeing a lot of chatter on social media about “opting out,” which means parents keeping their kids home on days in which standardized tests are given. I don’t really understand the fuss.
I’ll admit to having a privileged view of the whole situation, being a product of a well off middle class public school and being someone who’s good at standardized tests. In fact, I like standardized tests. I know they’re not perfect, but in my environment growing up, the scores kids got on standardized tests corresponded pretty damn well with my personal opinion of how smart they were. Yeah, there were a few outliers, and for the handful of smart kids who were bad test takers, the SATs are pretty unfair. But we’re not talking about entrance exams, these are essentially anonymous tests to evaluate the performance of whole populations, right?
These are the objections I’ve seen:
The tests are used to evaluate individual teachers’ performances. I’ll agree that this can be a problem, but that’s an issue with how the school board or state is using the tests, not with the test itself. If test scores are combined with other data (classroom observations, additional demographic data), it seems like they can be a useful tool for finding problem teachers or identifying areas that need improvement.
Schools are abandoning real education in order to boost their test numbers. Again, this is a real problem, but the solution is to help under-performing schools improve rather than punishing them for low scores. This is a policy problem, and still not the tests’ fault.
The kids get stressed out. Really? Whose fault is that? Whenever we took standardized tests we were told to eat a good breakfast and otherwise not worry about how we did.
It’s a waste of time. But isn’t there some very real value in being able to judge a school or class’s performance? And if you’re doing things right, you shouldn’t have to teach to the test. Just do what you normally do and spend 1 or 2 days a year on testing. That’s how it should work, right?
I can certainly see how voters and parents might object to how standardized tests are implemented, but only one of the objections above (stressed out kids) is immediately resolved by parents keeping their kids home on test day. The other objections are going to be better dealt with at the ballot box.
Things have changed a lot since I was a kid, though. Am I just out of touch?
A lot of the issue in my town (opt outs are around 40% overall) has to do with “teaching to the test”. Rather than teaching a broad set of skills, the focus is on the skills that are on the test. You mention it, but suggest teachers just do what they normally do, and hope the test comes out OK.
If it doesn’t, the teacher’s performance evaluation takes a hit, so who would use that strategy? Even if it does turn out OK, if the teacher spent MORE time on test topics, it would be even better, and who wouldn’t choose a great evaluation over an OK evaluation?
Around here, they seem to spend a lot more than 1-2 days on the testing, and had to buy something like a million dollars of computer technology to support the testing.
While I like the idea of standard performance testing for teachers, I think the implementation is a problem because they’re only going to teach what’s on the test, there’s no direct benefit to going outside the test parameters.
Yes, it seems that you are just out of touch. I work as a Technology Coordinator in a big city public school, and there are way way more than 1-2 days of testing in a year. That’s how it was when I was in school too, but times have changed. We just finished 2 weeks of PARCC testing less than a month ago for the middle of the year exam, and now we have the end of the year PARCC exams starting next week. How much could the students have learned in one month? The problem is that most standardized testing these days is really about the testing company making a lot of money off of the education system. Pearson makes absolute bank for this test, for no explainable benefit, and this is just one example. We have a standardized test seemingly every month. I think there were something like 30 days last year that were used for testing. I can’t pull up where I saw that, but in my experience that seems about right.
Not every kid takes every test, but here is a list of tests that are scheduled that downtown just sent us:
PARCC: EOY schedules, EOY data transfer
Benchmarks: Q3 Literacy and Social Science
REACH Performance Tasks: Tasks on KC, Significantly Modified Sessions
NWEA: EOY reminders, Benchmark grades deadline, Science
STAR (Options schools only): MOY not tested reasons, EOY reminders
EXPLORE, PLAN: Delivery, Additional Orders, Updates on KC, EOY reminders
Algebra Exit Exam: Update schedules, order accommodations, private/charter testing
That isn’t even a complete list, but with PARCC, NWEA, STAR, EXPLORE, PLAN etc. not to mention the ACT (we’re a high school), there is always some test coming up, from the beginning of the year to the end.
How do they incentive kids to do well on the tests? I remember we used to have some sort of Statewide achievement test every year in grade school, but ones performance on the test didn’t really affect anything and so even a lot of the more “serious” kids ended up blowing it off and just filling in Xmas tree patterns on the bubble sheet.
This. I feel bad in retrospect as I’m sure it helped the school/teacher out if I had done better. But the fact that they weren’t graded made it a blow-off for most of the kids in my honors classes, including me.
I’m very similar. I like tests, especially standalone tests - they work well with the way I think and learn - non-linearly and at my own pace. I’m one of those people who thinks that anyone should be allowed to take qualifying examinations for anything - want to just up and register for the bar exam? Sure! You probably won’t pass, but if you’ve really and truly mastered the material, then you shouldn’t have to go to law school for three years to be slowly spoon-fed knowledge and skills that you already have.
If anything, I want there to be more tests - tests that give credentials and opportunities for those who have the skills and are up for the adventure.
I’m hoping to sabotage the efforts to use achievement testing to evaluate and punish educators.
Seriously. It’s totally a political thing for me. I want them to fail so they have no choice but to go back to letting teachers teach. My only powers are to write letters to legislators (done), opt my child out of the exams (done) and encourage other parents to opt their children out (done.) If enough of us refuse, the system breaks down, and the tests cannot be (mis)used.
If I want to know how my daughter is doing in school, I look at her work and her report card. I talk to her teacher. I ask her how she’s doing and if she’s satisfied or needs help.
If the principal wants to know how my daughter’s class is doing, she can speak with the teacher, observe a class, talk to the students and parents.
If the school district wants to know how the school is doing, they can look at report cards, talk to the principal, interview the teachers, students and parents.
If the state wants to know how the school district is doing, they can look at the report cards, talk to the school district, examine retention/promotion/graduation rates.
What I don’t want to be any part of, not even second hand, is bad science. And bad science is taking a test designed to assess one thing (student achievement) and using it to asses another thing (teacher/school performance.)
Come up with a test that’s actually *designed *to test teachers’ abilities and performance, and I’ll gladly participate. So far no one has done that.
The big problem is that testing has gotten completely out of hand. It isn’t 1 or 2 days a year on testing. It’s more like 1 or 2 weeks every month.
The thing is, NCLB requires a lot of testing itself, and then school boards want to know way in advance how they would do on those tests (so they can try to fix things in time for the “real” tests) , so they make the kids take tests in between.
I worked in standardized testing for just over a decade. If teachers are actually teaching to the test, humanity is doomed within the next generation or two. I find it difficult to believe the answers so many kids give can be so stupid if they’re being coached in anyway.
I’ve personally found the people who oppose standardized testing to be usually suffering from scientific illiteracy, namely that of statistics. Statistical analysis is extremely powerful and can determine to whatever level of confidence we desire–5%, 1%, .01%, so on–that a teacher is underperforming. People who are reflexively opposed to testing in all its forms seem to be about on par with climate change deniers in their intentional refusal to understand the science. And if the test isn’t explicitly designed to measure teacher performance? Economists and statisticians have been using tests (like longitudinal surveys) designed for one thing to make inferences about something else for 50 years. It’s not “bad science” and it’s not even cutting edge. It’s the way we’ve been doing things for practically as long as anyone can remember, and it’s absolutely accepted within the scientific community.
If you think that the only way to make inferences about the world is to design an explicit test and then administer it, you’re stuck somewhere in the 1920’s. But given the troglodyte pedagogic views of many who oppose standardized testing, this isn’t very surprising.
Moreover, even in the most implausible implausibility, that the science is completely junk, who cares? Its time for teachers to live in the 21st century, where jobs are a willing agreement between two parties, not an inalienable right to more money until the day you die. People in the free market get no such protections, and yet things still work out pretty much OK. The purpose of the public education system is to provide the best, least expensive education for our kids, not to serve as welfare for teachers.
Principals and others in charge of hiring solutions have access to a wide array of data they can use to decide who to hire. There’s no plausible mechanism whereby providing more information leads to worse outcomes. It’s time to take a deep breath and rely on the free market system to handle teacher employment, like it already takes care of the food supply, oil, pharmaceuticals, and countless other products necessary for civilization.
The burden of testing is pretty high. It’s not just the hours taking the test. For tests which affect the school’s funding, there may be a full week of preparation. Normal course work is delayed as students spend the class reviewing test material and practicing.
Once funding or employment is tied to the results of a test, there will be excessive focus on getting the best results. Often, this is achieved by gaming the system so that the students simply learn the subset of material which is on the test. Or there may be outright cheating where the administrators change the student’s answers, like in the Atlanta Cheating Scandal
And one critical detail is that how a student does on a test may have nothing to do with how bright a student is. Many students excel in non-standard ways which are not captured by standardized tests, or they may just not be good in a testing situation. But since the test result is all that matters, that’s all that the school cares about for that student. It can lead to limiting creativity of the students since they are all forced to produce the same results.
The education system, like Michael Scott, thrives under a lack of accountability.
The best teacher I ever had was a math teacher who only gave test on history to avoid being accused of teaching to the test.
I don’t understand what is wrong with ‘teaching to the test’. People have made it sound like this bad thing. The people who are against standardized testing are in many ways similar to anti-vaxxers. They forget the past and have no clue what they are looking at or how to evaluate education. They latch on to fun tag lines (like, teaching to the test).
If you are not teaching to some sort of test or assessment, then you should not be teaching. Period.
The state’s curriculum and standards are taught on a daily basis and then (gasp!) tested on the state’s own standardized test! What a crazzzzy concept!
I also keep hearing about a school’s funding being tied to testing. Can someone provide a real world example where a school lost funding because of a poor standardized test result?
Thank you. This is a very, very important point. Imagine if you were teaching a class and needed to come up with a final exam. What would you put on it? Wouldn’t you concentrate on testing the material that you actually taught? “Teaching to the test” is pretty much the same thing but in reverse - someone already came up with the final exam based on their own curriculum, so now you just need to reverse-engineer what their curriculum was probably like and then teach that. It encourages teachers to teach a standard set of concepts rather than just teaching whatever they felt like. E.g. if History teachers are told to just teach “medieval history” and Mrs. Spickle spends the semester discussing the effects of the Catholic Church on the culture and politics of medieval France and Germany in depth but Mr. Smith spends the time mostly talking about the Clans of Scotland and assigns a project to make a great kilt, then what do you get? Does this school really have any educational standards?
What can be bad, however, is if teachers are teaching “to” a stupid test. That’s completely different than just teaching to a test. The real problem may be coming up with an effective, accurate, and comprehensive exam that tests for mastery of the material, not memorization of trivia. If you, as a teacher, find yourself preferring to teach trivia rather than concepts because you feel that the trivia will be more effective in passing the exam - then the problem is the exam, not your teaching.