High-Stakes Testing in American Public Schools
High-stakes testing is bad for education. The concept effectively forces teachers to “teach to the test,” holds all students to the same standards (regardless of their strengths and weaknesses), and, thus, is conducive to cheating (by students and teachers alike).
A teacher teaching to the test, or simply teaching the test itself, is a waste of everybody’s time. In my own experience, during the 2005-06 school year (third grade, when the dreaded Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) began), our teacher, as well as the other third grade teachers in the building, taught us how to take the test for four weeks. Instead of educational content for those four weeks, we got sheet after sheet of MAP test practice. Constructed response was drilled into our heads, multiple choice sheets became more commonplace than anyone cares to remember, and we didn’t do much touching up on what we’d learned over the course of the year, but by god, we were going to know how to take that test. I would figure that most students in the American public school system during the No Child Left Behind era would have a similar experience.
There are two problems with this. The first is that standardized test should not be so difficult for the students that they have to be taught how to take it any differently than their regular classroom tests. The second is that it took away a chunk of useful class time. Figure we spend six weeks on the test altogether (four for “practice,” and two for the test itself)—out of a forty-week school year, those six weeks make up fifteen percent of the school year. That is simply too much of the school year that’s being wasted teaching students how to beat a
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