Challenge high-stakes testing
I wish I could attend the ASCD conference this year. As usual though, the conference blog is outstanding. Isn’t blogging great? We get so many inside views, timely posts and a cross-section of perspectives on issues. This post entitled Historical Knowledge: A Challenge to Standardized Testing is a story that needs to be told. It is a story that counteracts the prevailing stories of test scores that Dave Warlick speaks about so effectively. We need more stories like this.
Dave says:
We have become convinced that test scores indicate an effective school and a successfully educated student, and by extension, a citizen who will prosper, contribute, and be happy in their future. It’s a story that is pretty easy to swallow because it is simple, and it connects easily to our own education-experiences of 10, 20, or 40 years ago. It’s the reason why we need a new story that will be so compelling, that it will shatter the ideas of high-stakes testing, by showing it to be totally irrelevant to our children’s future, and might I add, “our future.â€
Now an excerpt from the ASCD blog post:
If U.S. students perform poorly on tests that measure their grasp of things historical, blame it on the test, says Marc Turner, a lead teacher at Blythewood High School in Blythewood, South Carolina. Turner, named the 2005 Secondary Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies, states that if you “look at 100 years of social studies testing, our kids have scored low,” but it’s just the nature of the discipline, he says. Indeed, Turner just isn’t persuaded that a history assessment tells anyone very much about what students know.
Wineburg has noted that, because of mediocre tests results, many Americans are convinced that students don’t know history. The truth, Wineburg is quoted as saying, is that students haven’t memorized the lists of facts that test makers have determined are important to know.
This is the best part:
So, have students write historical narratives instead of taking tests, says Turner. “We should be promoting history as an interpretive experience,” suggests Turner. “There’s nothing wrong when kids reach potentially different conclusions about an event,” he observes—historians disagree all the time. What’s more, once students have written their narratives, they can “compare their interpretations to those of other scholars in the field,” making for a rich learning experience.
This is authentic assessment. I’d like to see a lot of these narratives on blogs where we could get lots of kids thinking about the different conclusions and adding to the ideas. The post notes that this will be a hot topic this year at the ASCD Annual Conference. I hope we will hear a lot more stories about these types of authentic assessments. Stories that will shatter the old stories Dave refers to “of seats in rows, nine-pound textbooks, lectures day-in and day-out, and the notion that we can measure success with a bubble sheet.”
There’s another interesting post on the ASCD blog, The Stakes Are High.
ASCD in 2004 issued a position statement calling high-stakes testing “an inappropriate use of assessment.”
The problem: High-stakes testing often fails to adequately measure what students know and are able to do. Even the best standardized tests often return results too late for educators to adapt classroom practices in ways that would help students.
They include an ASCD poll. This gives you the opportunity to give your opinion on the effect of high-stakes testing in schools. They also invite you to “tell us more about your experience with high-stakes tests.”
Share your opinions on the poll, then go blog about your challenges to high stakes testing. Here’s a couple of my previous posts on the subject:
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Historical narratives are closer to what they’ll do in real life anyway; if they want to be a historian.
A good learning experience involves activity and research. This is what I have learnt from studying Australian history.
March 27th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Hi Anne — I’m on the product development team of PBWiki and I’d love to share with you some information about our educational wikis; (Surprisingly, our educationa-based wiki’s are recieving the most traffic!) Penn State’s english 15 classes uses it to edit each other’s papers and Texas Tech uses it to collaborate.. I’d love your thoughts on this. I notice you’ve covered the idea of wiki’s and education a couple months ago.
I look forward to hearing from you. (I looked for your email address but couldn’t find it on the blog…)
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:39 am
The Issue of High Stakes Testing
High stakes testing has officially become a virus to the American educational community. While standardized testing was once simply an indicator of individuals’ and schools’ overall levels of performance, it has now become a life or death issue for both parties, preventing individuals from progressing educationally and, in some cases, causing funding for lagging schools to be discontinued completely. The effects of such tests are easily visible inside of the classroom, as the immense consequences that come with these tests both prevent teachers from effectively educating their students and have overwhelmingly negative psychological effects on the children being subjected to them. The effects of these tests are also beginning to become more visible outside of the classroom, in the “real worldâ€, as they clearly discourage social mobility by preventing those in the lower ranks of society from bettering their socioeconomic status.
The massive amount of emphasis that teachers are forced to place on material covered by high stakes tests leaves them with little time to instruct their students in many essential aspects of education that do not happen to appear on the tests. In High Stakes: Poverty, Testng, and Failure In American Schools, a depiction of a year spent teaching in a poor Louisiana school (one which is legally required to administer high stakes tests), David and Bonnie Johnson illustrate the manner in which they are required to “teach to the test†by directly following the instructions that they, as well as the rest of the elementary school staff, received at the beginning of the school year: “You must teach to mastery all the objectives that will be tested on the LEAP and Iowa tests [the high stakes tests administered in this school district]. Skip the others until after the tests next March. We have no time to teach fluff†(Johnson & Johnson 30). The Johnsons then go on to illustrate the negative effects that “teaching to the test†has on the education of their pupils. For example, due to the fact that teachers are forced to focus on syllabication rather than reading comprehension, the Johnson’s pupils are oftentimes able to pronounce words, but not understand them: “They can pronounce the word ‘harp’, but they have no idea what the word means†(Johnson & Johnson 72). The Johnsons sum up their frustration with their inability to truly educate their pupils by stating: “It has become clear even to the most optimistic that school is no longer for education. Schools are now test prep centers, and woe be to those who don’t do enough prepping†(Johnson &Johnson 31).
It has become increasingly clear that high-stakes testing plays a large role in preventing students from the lower classes from using education as a way to improve their socioeconomic situations. To begin with, the expectations that these tests have of students is inherently slanted against students of the lower classes:
Children who have been in programs like those offered by the “Baby Ivies†since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations†(Kozol 46).
In other words, middle and upper class children are able to approach these examinations with a great deal of knowledge that lower class children, held to the same standards, do not possess. Lower class children are therefore put at a great disadvantage, and are therefore much more likely to fail the test. While this clearly prevents many of them from progressing to the next grade, failing the test also carries a number of other likely consequences. For example, in Silenced Voices and Extraordinary Conversations, an examination of lower-class students, Michelle Fine and Lois Weis mention that:
The proliferation of increased high-stakes testing means that more students will leave high school without a diploma, at just the moment when the presence of a high school diploma is a critical economic litmus test separating the haves from the have nots. While the origins of the ‘standards movement’ may have been systematic accountability, the consequences… for poor and working-class students are likely to be devastating (Fine & Weis 9).
While it may seem trivial that a child cannot progress a grade while in elementary school, the fact that these tests prevent students that desperately need a degree, oftentimes even deserve one (the authors mention a boy that has a 95 average and a very high ranking in his class who is still at risk of graduating without a diploma due to his failure of high-stakes tests), is a harsh reminder of the terrible amount of power that these standardized tests have over the lives of lower-class American students.
Aside from affecting drastically affecting their futures, high-stakes testing also takes a large psychological toll on American students. For example, Daniel and Bonnie Johnson describe the psychological torment that they witnessed in their third and fourth grade classrooms on the day that the tests were administered: “As the children begin the first timed test, Kelvin vomits in his hands and runs to the bathroom…Gerard takes one look at the first section and begins to cry†(Johnson & Johnson 137). Clearly such behavior is a result of the anxiety that the students feel upon facing such a deterministic challenge. Later on in the book, they quote a “veteran fourth grade teacher†as saying: “High-Stakes testing is putting an unprecedented form of pressure on districts, teachers, and students. When we have to hire extra janitorial staff on high-stakes testing days to clean up the vomit, we know that things are getting ridiculous†(Johnson & Johnson 224). While this kind of anxiety may be condoned in college-bound seniors facing the SAT for the first time, the fact that third and fourth graders are forced to face this kind of mental trauma is nothing short of absurd.
High-stakes tests are much more than a waste of a few hours that could be put to better use in the classroom; they are a socially oppressive, mentally traumatic force that is increasingly being unleashed upon American students. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our society is currently unaware of the issue, and it is therefore being allowed to worsen by the day. I ask anyone reading this to please make some sort of effort, be it through a letter, a donation, etc. to put an end to what is quickly becoming one of the most prevalent social injustices in modern American society.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
[…] I received this interesting comment from someone named Peter in reference to a post I made about challenging high-stakes testing back in March 2006. I think the comment is worth repeating here. It gives us more to think about on this issue. Peter had no link and I have not seen this research before. Does anyone know where it might be located? […]