Standardized Tests Are The Tail Of Education: they never could wag this puppy, and they shouldn't try
As a young adult, which was by now many, many moons ago, I was drawn – goaded, really – into what was for me a very intense war of words (repeatedly) on the subject of SAT tests. My tormentor was a childhood friend of my father’s, so he had the superior position of age and knowledge and wisdom on me, but not experience with the sense of falling shy of expectation, as either parent, student or teacher.
The subject of “standardized tests” was controversial even then, though the debate focused largely on SATs even while there were several other rafts of such beasts.
The reason was then as now, that it was these particular tests that were understood as essential constrictors, funneling students into school and career paths as a function of issues that were unknown and variable.
It was not until long after matriculating college that it began to feel legitimate to confront the tyranny of these tests. Some element of “sour grapes” infused an individual’s experience in the beginning, which time rendered if not moot then at least less acute. I had found their judgmental paradigm to be very upsetting and the consequences quite derivative (unannounced scholarships, school rejections) of my sense of what they should be – predictors of “success”. Having passed from their “cone of influence” emboldened the urge to articulate their trauma.
“They don’t test anything” I would assert hyperbolically, meaning, I suppose, that they did not somehow reflect academic or intellectual “worth” accurately. “Nonsense”, bellowed the family friend. “How can you say they don’t test anything; of course they test something…”. A rhetorical trap that just raised my dander. But then came the truism that is in fact profound: “They test what they test!”
Right there in a nutshell, is encapsulated the history and raison d’etre of standardized tests. They test what they test.
Flash forward a half century or so and a “Smarter-Balanced” refinement has come not in the quality of the test but in its breadth in order to validate the underlying concept of itself, not the derivative one of its value. In order for such a construct, for this kind of test itself to be meaningful, it must be invoked as a comparative metric, administered nationwide as a function of … what it tests. Not some external Truth. Like, say, Education. Standardized testing is: a test of the test.
This imperative has been codified in the Common Core – formerly known as “Common Core State Standards” (CCSS). The disingenuous reference in the moniker to the foundation myth that this initiative was borne of the States themselves has quietly been dropped of late. The program – and its tests – are referred to now simply as “Common Core” (CC). The program promulgates a set of tests standard across states as the means to measure and monetize education Standardized Tests Are The Tail Of Education: they never could wag this puppy, and they shouldn’t try – redqueeninla: