- MENU
- HOME
- SITE
- JOBS
- VIDEOS
- WORLD
- MAIN
- AFRICA
- ASIA
- BALKANS
- EUROPE
- LATIN AMERICA
- MIDDLE EAST
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Benelux
- Brazil
- Canada
- China
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italy
- Japan
- Korea
- Mexico
- New Zealand
- Pakistan
- Philippines
- Poland
- Russia
- South Africa
- Spain
- Taiwan
- Turkey
- USA
- BUSINESS
- WEALTH
- STOCKS
- TECH
- HEALTH
- LIFESTYLE
- ENTERTAINMENT
- SPORTS
- RSS
- iHaveNet.com: Education
The High Stakes of High-Stakes Standardized Testing
by Robert Koehler
A mind is a terrible thing to test, especially a child's mind -- if, in so doing, you reduce it to a number and proceed to worship that number, ignoring the extraordinary complexity and near-infinite potential of what you have just tested.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
What if?
What if the American education bureaucracy understood these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson and honored the latent genius of every student? What if it funded teachers and schools with as much enthusiasm as it did corporate vendors? What if, in some official way, we loved kids and their potential more than the job slots we envisioned for them and judged them only in relationship to their realization of that potential? What if standardized testing, especially the obsessive, punitive form that has evolved in this country, went the way of the dunce cap and the stool in the corner?
What if the education process were allowed to move the human race to a higher level of awareness? That is to say, what if it weren't stagnant and political but, instead . . . sacred, in the way that it feels sacred to hold an infant in one's arms?
I know that's asking a lot, but I feel emboldened to pose such questions as I become aware that standardized testing and the all-pervasive political hold it has on education is being challenged at the grass-roots level. Teachers across the country are standing up to the standardized testing system and parents are opting out of it: They're refusing to let their 8- to -13-year-olds take these "high stakes" tests that so many jobs and so much money rides on. And this movement, small as it is, has become news.
The Riverhead (N.Y.) News-Review, for instance, reported last week that "parents and educators statewide continue to protest so-called high-stakes testing tied to the controversial Common Core State Standards," with the parents of 118 students in grades 3 through 8, in the Shoreham-Wading River school district, on Long Island, saying "their children will not sit" for the English and math tests in April and May, up from 25 who opted out last year.
And Gina Bellafante, writing recently in The
What's so wrong with standardized testing that a movement is rising up against it? A number of complaints come up again and again. The most egregious and overwhelming, from my point of view, is that such testing fails to measure what it claims to measure, often by a long shot, but nevertheless inevitably produces scores gauging the knowledge level of every student taking it, which, when below preset standards, are used in a punitive fashion against both teacher and school, denying them jobs and funding.
Furthermore, a great deal of time and effort go into the preparation for and administration of the tests, thus stealing time from other subjects -- even in classes where the students aren't being tested. One mother, for instance, quoted in a report on Pittsburgh TV station WTAE said that her daughter, a first-grader, "may be too young to take the tests, but she's losing class time because her teachers are helping to administer them to other students." Inevitably what disappears from classrooms is focus on the arts and other "soft" subjects, mastery of which, of course, hardly lends itself to simplistic measurement.
Many parents complain about the stress their kids are placed under to participate in these high-stakes tests, which play such a role in the fate of teacher, school and district: absurd, joy-choking stress it hardly makes sense to require young children to endure. Added to that is a fear of test-taking that many students already have, which high-stakes testing only aggravates. Such factors throw the validity of the statistics the tests produce into serious question.
Other factors also sully these stats, which have such power to wreak havoc in our schools. From the website Change the Stakes: "State exams are loaded with poorly written, ambiguous questions. A recent statement signed by 545 New York State principals noted that many teachers and principals could not agree on the correct answers."
Diane Ravitch makes the point that the tests give no useful feedback to teachers about what the students actually know. "They have no diagnostic value," she writes on her website. "The test asks questions that may cover concepts that were never introduced in class. The test is multiple-choice, creating an unrealistic expectation that all questions have only one right answer."
And, eerily: "High-stakes testing undermines teacher collaboration," the Change the Stakes website points out. "Teachers are judged on a curve, which discourages them from helping students in another teacher's class."
The simplest, most plaintive complaint of all is that these tests take the joy out of learning. They mock the craft and complexity of teaching at the same time that they hold schools and teachers responsible for all the unaddressed socioeconomic impediments to learning that plague our society. In the movement to counter standardized testing, the stakes are high indeed.
EDUCATION NEWS ...
- A Crash Course on Reality
- College Majors That Don't Pay Off
- Is The New GED Too Tough?
- D-Day is Dumb Day for Too Many
- Time to Get Serious About Sexual Assault on Campuses
- The Peculiar Madness of 'Trigger Warnings'
- Trigger Warnings: Maya Angelou's Uncomfortable Facts and Truths
- The End of Affirmative Action
- Race and College Admission: A Volatile Issue
- Affirmative Action Finds Brave Defense in Sotomayor's Dissent
- The High Stakes of High-Stakes Standardized Testing
- Defending Kwasi Enin: A High Achiever
- The ABC's of School Choice
- College Laundry 101: Understanding the Basics
- Changes to SAT will Even Out Playing Field
- Liberal Students have a Funny Definition of 'Diversity'
- Asphyxiating Education
- Liberal Arts: An Endangered Species Up in Arms
- School for Scandal
- A Future Stuck in the Pipeline
- Financial Aid Group Calls on Feds to Shore Up Lending to Parents
- Boys in the Back of the Class
- An Education Reform That Will Work
- Income-Based Diversity Push Falls Short at Elite Colleges
- You Can't Fix Education by Lowering the Bar
- The New American Helots
- The Commencement Address That Won't Be Given
- College, Loans and the Road to Success
- Avoid 5 Assumptions About College Financial Aid
- Engagement Is Key to Community College Success
- Computer Science Transitions From Elective to Requirement
- Future in Politics Less Desirable Among Today's Pre-Law Students
- College Student Leaders Divided on Benefits of Student Government
- 6 Resume Writing Tips for Business School Grads
- LinkedIn Transforms Job Search for M.B.A. Graduates
- Some Teens Start College Work Early Via Dual Enrollment
- How to Get In: Georgia Institute of Technology College of Management
- How to Get In: Purdue University Krannert School of Management
- How to Get In: Tulane University A. B. Freeman School of Business
- How to Get In: University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business
- More Schools Debut Tuition Guarantee Programs
- New Three-Year Degree Programs Trim College Costs
- Free Online Classes May MBA Students
Article: Copyright ©, Tribune Media Services.
"The High Stakes of High-Stakes Standardized Testing"