High-stakes testing is one of our biggest obstacles to overcome!
An article, Standardized tests can send students who fail into a tailspin, from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (NY) features a principal arguing for testing reform. Hear! Hear! Our insanity about testing really is one our biggest obstacles in transforming education. It does my soul good to hear a principal speaking out. Some points he makes:
- The purpose of testing should be to help students grow academically, not to coerce higher test performances through public scrutiny and humiliation. We need more authentic valid assessments. Volumes of research prove that subjective teacher assessment is a much more accurate predictor of student success than any single standardized test score.
- Test writers construct standardized tests for the purpose of creating a wide range of scores, with roughly half scoring above average and the other half below.
- Standardized test scores do not tell how well schools are preparing students as citizens and leaders. Characteristics such as leadership, perseverance, listening skills and compassion are far more accurate predictors of success. Standardized tests can’t measure that.
- The emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing is creating a culture of failure among many students.
- Students who are poor, who are from English-as-a-second language families, who have special education needs, who desire to have a vocational education or who have unique interests or learning styles, have suffered under the one-size-fits-all.
Dan Drmacich says if you agree you should voice you concerns to school district officials, state and federal representatives.
This is an area where we need to do much more. Add to the obstacles wiki any links that will help us fight this. We need to do more than just speak to school officials and state and federal reps. Let’s collect a bank of data and break out of the blogs and take back our jobs of teaching. Yes we want accountability but assessment needs to come from a variety of sources. A while back Chris Lehmann posted here and referred us to Classroom Assessment: A Brave New World by Dr. Douglas D. Christensen.
The culture of high stakes testing is toxic. It not only takes the oxygen out of the work, it also makes all the wrong things important, as if they are the right things. For example, high stakes testing treats students, teachers and data as “commodities†to be manipulated as variables in some kind of strange economy or in some perverse experiment. In addition, I believe high stakes testing freezes the current system in place treating current practice as if it is good practice and practice that should be continued even though the whole point of accountability is to improve the system where a lot of current practice does not work. High stakes testing standardizes the current schooling model assuming it can work for all students, in all settings and under all conditions and we know that it does not and we know that it cannot. High stakes testing prevents the very innovation we should be encouraging.
Dr. Christensen nails assessment down to the correct place - in our classrooms with our teachers.
Some of my previous posts on this topic:
I’m probably not done posting. This is one of our biggest obstacles to overcome!
December 2nd, 2006 at 11:26 am
Did you see NCLB–The Football Version?
Author Unknown
l. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.
5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.
If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Well you know *I* agree with you.
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:00 am
I find you thoughts interesting, I added comments to my blog at http://beginingat50.blogspot.com/, Thanks for sharing.
Art
December 4th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Thanks, Liz! I needed this! Your blog keeps me going on many days! The humor helps!
Thanks Chris for speaking out on this and many other issues!
Good thinking Art! Keep joining the conversations.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:18 am
Anne,
I know in some circles this can be a dirty word but I’d be interested to hear where you stand–what is your feeling on a public charter school system?
Ideally, I see it as a way to accomodate the diverse needs of learners and teachers…but it seems less compatible with our current fixation on testing. Your last bullet point about one-size-fits-all brought this question to mind…
Cheers, Tiffany
March 19th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Isn’t it supposed to be NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND? Well, all high stakes testing is doing is causing a greater gap between the under-funded schools and the upper middle class to executive elite schools. Upper middle class schools, though they may dread taking the test, most of the time think of these tests as a waste of time for their students who are beyond the knowledge on the tests. An effective school has nothing to do with the basis of ONE test. And a test should also not prove whether or not you are a good student. All of this though, really depends on the social class backgrounds that these students live in.
According to Anyon, “students of different social class backgrounds are still likely to be exposed to qualitatively different types of educational knowledge.†Comparing an impoverished schools’ scores to an executive elite school’s scores is utterly ridiculous. This makes sense because students that are imprisoned in the lowest rungs of the social ladder are subject to the lowest forms of education and given the least opportunities with the least necessary tools to succeed anywhere close to the wealthier schools that have anything and everything they need to teach these students whereas in poor schools, the teachers must scrounge for anything.
I will defend this with data from Johnson and Johnson’s, High Stakes Testing: Children, Testing, and Failure in American Schools. To begin with I will look at how the scores foretell the destiny of the school. Schools that score extremely low are in danger of being denied funding, but the only thing this does it to make the polarizing gap between the impoverished schools and the wealthy schools (and their students) even worse. What this high stakes testing does is to neglect family accountability. The scores tend to place the teachers at blame of a student’s low score. However, what these scores do not do is to make the family, not just the teachers, accountable for these scores.
The high stakes testing is making these differences between schools more apparent and obvious to everyone, which is causing embarrassment among the lower ranked schools. This embarrassment is causing chaos in the school systems because they are going at all lengths to make sure there test scores are high. Its depressing what the high stakes testing is doing to our society. To me, I have always thought teachers were supposed to be caring and be there for the kids that are not at the same level as the rest of the children. Being in college, I could talk to every student in my class and I guarantee almost every one of them could name a teacher that had a positive impact on their life or even just went out of their way to help them succeed. Unfortunately, I feel like the high stakes testing is taking that away from the children because it is not allowing the teachers to teach and it is putting so much pressure on them that they no longer care about what “extra†knowledge they can teach the kids. The teachers see the children who are having trouble learning as a setback instead of an opportunity to help him/her succeed. Its sad to think that even the teachers of our society are being turned into heartless business men! In my eyes it was one of the very few jobs left that was full of compassion and now even that’s being taken away from our children. This shows where our society is heading.
As an example, I want to cite Johnson and Johnson about the Louisiana LEAP tests. A school called Redbud Elementary, was so deeply under funded that there was no playground, no library, no hot water, no art classes, one bathroom, no constantly working air conditioning, and some of the students lived without electricity, running water, or floors. The teachers of this extremely under funded school were sometimes not even certified. And even so, the teachers had only one prerogative in their classrooms as given to them by the superintendents: get their students to pass the LEAP test. Teachers were given no freedom to teach the curriculum they wanted to, they were treated like children: told exactly what to teach, which they had to record every detail of their days, were basically “threatened†that an administrator would check up on their classrooms to make sure that the teacher was following correct preparation curriculums. They had to focus only on the LEAP test, allowing little free time to help the children with their individual needs (as the preparation was the curriculum). Not only that but they were forced to attend workshops and meetings in their afternoons (little time for one-on-one tutoring) and during class, there was only enough time to teach whatever the administration had given them to prepare for the LEAP test.
The most interesting point to me is that the low scores result in losing government funding. However, the government should be the one to specifically help these type of schools because they are the ones that administer the “no child left behind†program. Student would come to school sick, cold, underfed, dirty, poorly clothed, and without the adequate supplies for the school (which the teachers would have to purchase out of their own pockets because they are only given a $200per year for supplies). So therefore unless graciously donated they are left with little to nothing when it comes to supplies. The most current dictionary is copyright 1952; no more than two bathrooms; they have no stable internet connections; no playground; not many maps or globes; and not much time for individual time with their teachers because the high stakes testing administration consumes all of a teachers time. They DO NOT have the necessary tools and supplies to make their school effective. A teacher is not a miracle worker and even if they were they wouldn’t have the time or energy to administer it.
January 30th, 2010 at 5:38 am
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