And The Answer Is: Testing Drives People Nuts
A guest editorial by Gerald W. Bracey
Test-Induced Craziness. Call it the TIC tic. Consider it Orwellian. Orwell’s Newspeak pounded the brain with certain ideas while precluding others. So it is that many school people can today think only of test scores and sanctions, and their cerebrums can no longer entertain the idea of “education.â€Â
In Bennett, Colorado, Frank Maes, a father and middle school math teacher whose brain is still capable of thinking beyond tests, told the administration that his sixth-grade daughter, Nicole, would not participate in the Colorado state testing program: “All it does is label schools and kids.â€Â
OK, fine, said Bennett’s administration, but if Nicole doesn’t take the tests she won’t get promoted to seventh grade. This is official Bennett policy. She took the tests.
Unlike some states, Colorado doesn’t offer any “opt-out†provision. It punishes schools that can’t round up all their kids on test day: as it grades Colorado’s schools, it gives zeros to students who bailed out. The state can take over schools with low grades and convert them to charter schools which, given the low performance of charters, doesn’t sound exactly like a rational policy.
Meanwhile, Aberdeen, Washington schools suspended, nine-year-old fourth grader, Tyler Stoken, for a week for not completing the state test. Not for declining to take the test. Not for having refusenik parents who kept him home on test day. For failing to complete the test.
Tyler was doing fine until he hit a writing prompt that said, “Now children, you’re looking out the window and see your principal flying by….†Tyler was supposed to create a fanciful story about the flying principal.
Tyler didn’t know what to write so he wrote nothing. Six times the teacher commanded Tyler to write. Six times Tyler sat there. The principal summoned Tyler’s mother to the school to extract the tale. No luck. Mom told reporters that he simply didn’t know how to answer the question. Tyler says he was trying to save face for the administration: “I couldn’t think of what to write without making fun of the principal.†Quite a dilemma.
He needn’t have worried. Principal Olivia McCathy was quite capable of looking foolish on her own. Her letter to Tyler’s mother said, in part, “The fact that Tyler chose to simply refuse to work on the WASL (the test’s acronym) after many reasonable requests is none other than blatant defiance and insubordination.†She called Tyler’s perversity “a particularly egregious wound†to his classmates whose average score Tyler’s zero torpedoed. Tyler’s mom has joined Mothers Against the WASL.
And from Texas, a state where high schools can lose 400 kids a year and still claim that they have no dropouts, reports come of a more commonly occurring form of child abuse. Four kids who don’t speak English very well and who flunked the Texas reading test twice, are pulled from Judith Bingham’s fifth grade each day “and taken to a sixth grade teacher. He spends all morning teaching them ‘new’ strategies. The strategies are not new but are (simply) presented by yet one more person…While they are tutored, they get no P. E., no Music or Library break.†If they fail again, they have to go to summer school and if they flub that, they get to repeat 5th grade, thereby greatly increasing the probability that they’ll leave school without graduating.
Bingham: “I’m asking the public, Can’t we do something to stop this? Accountability is one thing; abuse is something else.â€Â
Not too many years ago, we spoke of “love of learning,†“lifelong learning†and “learning for learning’s sake.†No more. Just as Newspeak closed off ideas the government didn’t like, so the testing juggernaut has come to preclude the idea of a genuine education. Consider the long term implications. Who among children enduring such assaults upon their psyches will consider later returning to schools as teachers?
The testing systems above are all state-level programs, but they also function as part of the even more punitive federal No Child Left Behind law. Using smoke and mirrors about high standards and accountability, these programs are doing everything in their power to destroy the concept of education. I can only hope that there are dark recesses in the brain where Newspeak has not yet penetrated that will let us one day look back on the TIC tic years and ask, “What on earth were we thinking?â€Â
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For year the St. Louis Public Schools had a program called the Metropolitan Students Leadership Program (MSLP), a fine program that I was privileged enough to go through. It taught group dynamics, self-sufficiency, leadership, conflict resolution and was a great chance for city kids to go camping.
A few years ago they cancelled it because it didn’t contribute to test scores.
It did contribute to society by creating thinkers who could get along with others. It’s a shame that non-tangibles like that can’t be measured with a test.
Since these tests are statistically better measures of your race and income than they are of how much you learned (a child who made it from low second grade skills to third grade skills is still considered failing if he’s classified as 4th grade!) I think the best solution would be to sue the government for racial discrimination. It’s well known that black and Hispanic kids do proportionately poorer on the tests, even when compared to white kids who attend the same schools and get the same grades. Ergo, the tests discriminate on race and should be illegal.
If I remember right, Einstein said that not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured - matters. As I get older I find that it’s the intangible things that are more meaningful.
I’m a teacher. I hate the tests. It’s not that I don’t think teachers and schools should be accountable — they should — it’s that the tests don’t really account for much of anything.
I recently asked several people some of the “core content” assessed on our Kentucky state testing. I started with my mother. Now, let me point out that my mother did not finish college but she is a rather bright woman. Finishing college — or even starting it — wasn’t the same thing in her day as it is now. She ended up vice president of a company in a field that was dominated by men. As a single mother, she put three daughters through a rather expensive private school, so she’s pretty successful, too. She had no idea the answers to the questions I asked about English. Is she an avid reader? No, but she raised three daughters who are avid readers. She instilled a life-long love of language in me. My sisters and nieces and nephews remember her reading to us when we were little. Now, in her retirement, she enjoys reading more than ever — possibly because she has time to do so.
So I asked my sister. My sister is a judge. A well-respected judge, as a matter of fact. When I asked her the questions she looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Who cares?” she asked without even attempting to answer. Her children are “A” students. They have college scholarships. They are well-rounded, both playing sports and participating in community service. (And don’t get me wrong — my sister thinks education is important. She just didn’t see any reason why those questions were important.)
I asked several other people, all very bright. One was a writer who has won awards for her work. She doesn’t know the technical terms for some of what she writes, but she can certainly execute them in a plot.
Not one person answered all of the questions cvorrectly. All of the people are contributing members of society, working various jobs or taking care of their homes and children. They are responsible, law-abiding folks. Most of them enjoy reading.
Now, I teach English and I can understand the importance of the terms and such from the test. However, for someone who doesn’t teach English and isn’t in an English class, the knowledge tested in an English section of a state assessment probably isn’t as important as the fact that someone enjoys reading and passes that trait on to children and grandchildren.
Unfortubately, what I’m finding in so many of my classes are students who are tired of connecting everything they read to the state tests and no longer enjoy reading. The less they read, the worse they perform in school. And when we break from the “teaching to the test” that administrators are requiring more and more, we’re chastised. My current school spends as much time teaching people how to respond to an “open-response question” (a short essay-type question that may be answered using a diagram/chart/bullets/phrases in addition to complete sentences that make up two-thirds of our state assesment)as we do teaching. I was told that I need to connect evey minute of my class to “core content” for the test. I couldn’t include an activity that lasted 15 minutes for one day and emphasized enjoying reading. Enjoying reading isn’t part of the core content.
That’s just one problem with the current testing. Since there are no benchmarks in our current assesment system and we’re testing our schools and their curriculi, we don’t see how students improve over a given year. We test if they are up to par with their age level. Given that we have some people coming into our high school reading at a third grade level and our intensive reading teacher works with them to improve their reading, say to a seventh grade level over the course of their freshman year, they’re still behind level, even though she’s really doing her job and someone else’s. But she’s “leaving children behind” while someone with upper level kids who come in reading on grade level and go out reading on grade level is achieving.
Like I said, I don’t have problems with being held accountable. I do have problems with the means for being held accountable in our current climate for education.
The fact that blacks and hispanics tend not to do as well on a particular test does not indicate that the test is racist. All it indicates is that blacks and hispanics are not as well educated on the subject matter of the test in question. So long as the tests are measuring objectively valid areas of knowledge, they are not racist, and anyone who does poorly or fails reflects another problem altogether…whether that problem reflects poverty, an unsatisfactory home life, a failure on the part of the parents to properly commit the child to doing the homework, or other limiting factor.
During the critical years of my education, I was exceedingly poor (my mother earned 60% of what welfare paid and refused all governmental assistance) and yet my knowledge and intellect reflect a wildly different story than is typical for poor areas. The schools and the testing criteria maybe a small part of the causes of poor educational performance, but the vast majority of it rides on the student and the student’s parents.
Children who make a commitment to work hard and do well in school will usually do so. While there are exceptions, the vast majority will do just fine. I made a commitment to do well while in circumstances that were less than ideal, and I have done so. There are thousands of kids like me throughout the country and the world who do very well despite meager resources. That’s because the kids decide to work hard and/or the parents decide to make the kids work hard.
In short, if any child with ordinary ability can succeed in those circumstances, then most other children can as well…it just requires work and dedication.
Sub
All tests are biased; they can’t help it. By biased, though, I don’t mean racially. The ones that I’ve heard of, taken, or seen in action test subtly on what the test-taker already knows and if that knowledge differs greatly from the test-writer’s knowledge — well, according to the test you’ve got an idiot. I remember seeing an IQ test that was developed from a cultural viewpoint very different than my own and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I would have failed it miserably.
One of my college professors was labeled either a cretin or a moron on the old IQ tests and didn’t learn to read until he was 9. A teacher discovered that he was really quite bright and mentored him. He went on to have quite an education, PhD and all. There was one question from that old test that stuck with him, and that he used to illustrate the problem with such tests; the student had to pick the picture of an object that went with a cup. My teacher picked a spoon because that’s what people in his household used to stir their morning coffee. He’d never even seen a saucer, the ‘correct’ answer. I’ll tell you something else about this man; he’s the only instructor I have ever had that I would pay both his and my weight in gold just for the privilege of listening to for the next year or so. Next to my parents he’s been the best teacher I’ve ever had. He was almost thrown away.
Concentrating on tests alone to show worthiness will always leave children behind because tests are always, always, always biased. I shudder to think of what we are losing because of this blind faith in a failed notion.
ORourke
The bias I was addressing was racial and not personal in nature. Some tests can be biased in the way you have described O’Rourke, but the ones that use math, reading, and word problems to determine one’s ability within those fields are rarely biased sufficiently to skew a score with any significance.
Sub