Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

All photos in this blog are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, unless specifically stated otherwise. If something written seems worth your time and effort, use it under the same license.

This is an archived blog. Those interested in my current blogging, feel free to visit
Runemanations where new posts will go.

Mon, 07 May 2012

Standardized Tests

I am not a fan of the pervasive presence of standardized testing in educaton. Real education happens at the three-way interface of teacher-student-challenge. There is little about a standardized test score that can connect to that.

Diane Ravitch is one of my guides in this. She is an educational historian who worked inside the educational testing scheme during an early phase of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and has changed her mind. She now speaks consistently about the damage being done to the education of children by the testing regime overseen by Pearson Education which is the maintainer of many (most?) of the test bank questions used across the United States. MCAS testing began as a test linked to high school graduation. In Massachusetts the MCAS test was given in grade 10, high school sophomores. Of course, it soon became a "good idea" to test in grade 8, then 7 to help prepare kids for the critical "high stakes" test in grade 10. You couldn't get a diploma without a passing score on the MCAS. Wasn't it logical to give the kids a bit of earlier practice?

Well, now my granddaughter has taken an MCAS test in fourth grade. I've heard that there will be MCAS testing in earlier grades soon. All of this testing is important, too. Governors around the country are promoting legislation to tie teacher evaluation to the test scores. It doesn't matter whether a teacher has established the best three-way interace with class after class of students. It only matters if the student scores on the tests have gone up. It really doesn't make sense to me. Standardized test scores, if they measure anything, measure how students compare to one another, to students who are taking the same question set in another juridiction. The standardized tests do not measure the progress of individual students, just the relative progress against other tested kids.

That means that kids are set up to compete against their peers. And, the nature of testing is: some students will do better than others. Those whose skills are tuned to standardized tests will do better. It won't matter if they are eager learners, just if they are good at the skills of eliminating horrible answers from the multiple choices and selecting what the test designers have decreed is the RIGHT answer. Naturally, it won't help the kids who are feeling the pressure and crumple under their stress. They won't benfit from the success of the others who didn't crumple.

There will again be "winners" and "losers." Sadly, like many educators in the classroom, I'm not much a fan of calling a kid a LOSER. I always felt my job was to encourage and challenge and support during the inevitable failures of learning. Standardized testing doubles down on the pressure of "getting the grade." There's no feedback from the testing to the kid. The test goes away (far away) to be evaluated. Teachers do not get real, timely, effective opportunity to see which questions were missed. The teacher cannot help any individual student to see what they got wrong, why they got it wrong and what to do about it. That kind of immediate feedback can happen during a regular student-teacher interaction. It simply cannot happen with standardized tests. The "power" of standardized tests is that they are intentionally removed from the hands of the professionals who work directly with the students. The removal is part of what is judged as the value of standardized tests. The standardized tests remove the bias of local control. The control is intentionally removed from the local teacher, the local school, the local district, even the "local" state. Control has been handed off to a corporate body, paid big money to disconnect the questions from the strengths of local classroom interaction.

Please sing along with me.
"Oh Pearson Tests, we sing thy praise,
the core for us in student days.
By you alone we pass or fail.
You are the holy grail."