What if they gave a test and nobody came?
It is standardized testing season in elementary and secondary schools across the nation. I cannot remember a time in the past 40 years, where this testing season has stirred-up so much controversy. Parents all over, but especially in New York, are opting their children out of the tests. Outraged champions of reform, like Michelle Rhee and Chester Finn, are chastising any and all who would opt out. Today the New York Times ran an anti-Common Core test op-ed by Elizabeth Phillips, Principal of PS 231 in Brooklyn, NY. Testing seems to be on everyone’s mind right now and the opposing camps are getting “testy” indeed.
And so today I am wondering, what if they gave the tests and nobody came? What would be the consequences? Would our education system as we know it fall apart and would children run amok in the streets like a scene from a Dickens novel? Would the country fall farther behind Finland and Singapore in educational achievement? Would the sun fall out of the sky? Would the Kansas City Royals win the pennant? Not likely.
In truth, if they gave the tests and nobody came very little would change as it relates to children, their teachers and their learning. The only thing these state-wide standardized tests measure with any accuracy is the socio-economic status of a child’s parents. David Berliner has addressed this very well here. The tests are less than useful for the classroom teacher since the results are rarely available to them in a timely manner (the students have moved on before the results are delivered to the school sometime in the summer) and even when they are delivered they offer scant information about what kinds of topics individual learners had difficulty with. Teachers gather much better and much more useful diagnostic information by working alongside the children daily, watching as they problem solve, reading what they write, listening while they read, asking them questions and listening to their responses.
So what would happen if nobody took the standardized tests? Here a just a few of the possible outcomes:
· Children would get more time for genuine instruction, not test prep and day after day of testing.