What Matters Most
by AFT President Randi Weingarten
Are We Testing Too Much?
NY Times, June 12, 2011
For all the efforts to improve education that are made in classrooms, school board meetings, research institutions, congressional chambers and elsewhere, one factor has in many ways eclipsed them all: an intense focus on standardized testing. High-stakes tests—flaws and all—seem to be driving everything from what subjects are taught, to how they are taught, to whether schools are closed, to how teachers are evaluated and compensated. Schools have even experimented with paying kids for higher test scores. Sadly, the pressure to measure has even diverted schools from implementing strategies known to improve student outcomes.
Beginning with the No Child Left Behind law and continuing today with Race to the Top, the federal emphasis on standardized assessments has become so excessive that it has modified state and district behavior in troubling ways. Curricula have been narrowed, test preparation has eaten into time for other instruction, and developing higher-order competencies has been sacrificed to fostering memorization and test-taking skills.
Appropriate assessments are a crucial part of effectively educating students. But they only measure a narrow segment of what kids need to learn. So before the testing police rush in to defend their position, let’s ask ourselves: What if this extreme focus on testing is driving us away from what students need? What if the current test-driven mania in the United States is wrong?
A constellation of recent reports suggests that this approach is, indeed, deeply flawed. A report released in May by the National Research Council of the National Academies found that “test-driven incentives have not consistently generated positive effects on student achievement.” It concluded that, in many cases, the effects “tend to be small and are