Time to Scale Back School Testing
Do you remember a teacher or other school employee who made a difference in your life? Perhaps someone who really brought an academic subject to life, or who simply helped you through a difficult time? How about a class or subject that thrilled you and made you want to learn more and more, even after you’d completed your assignments and passed the final exam?
Now think back to all of the standardized tests you’ve ever taken. Remember that one SAT analogy question that set you on the course to your future career? The multiple choice math problem that gave you the courage to try something you’d always been afraid to attempt before?
If you are struggling to come up with something, don’t feel bad. Neither of us can either, because while standardized tests have long been a part of public education, until recently, they’ve never been mistaken for its point and purpose.
Let’s stop pretending that a test score tells us all we need to know about our students, their teachers, or the public schools.
Let’s stop pretending that a test score tells us all we need to know about our students, their teachers, or the public schools.
That critical distinction is totally lost in our test-obsessed effort to turn our students into statistics. These tests are not meant to help teachers monitor student progress and tailor lessons to students’ individual needs. Instead, standardized tests are increasingly used as the single measure by which we judge the success of a school, the quality of its staff, and the learning of its students. And that’s just wrong.
We would never tell a doctor that a stethoscope is the only tool she needs to gauge her patients’ health, even if the tool is useful for its limited purpose. And we’d certainly object if a company that manufactures and sells stethoscopes tried to convince us to disregard ultrasounds, CAT scans and blood pressure readings. In medicine, we accept that no single measure can tell us all we need to know about a patient’s health.
We also know that identifying a health problem is only the first step. It’s much more important to find out what is causing the problem and act to remedy it. We rarely blame the doctor who identified the problem for causing it in the first place.
But in education, a single diagnostic tool – the standardized test — is being misused both to measure things it cannot really measure and to punish schools, students, and teachers for circumstances and outcomes they do not control. Class time that should be devoted to learning is now devoted instead to test-taking and test-preparation. Subjects thaTime to Scale Back School Testing - Lily's Blackboard:
What I Did in Texas this Week…
Lily visited several schools, met with superintendents, shared with members, listened to educators and interacted with beautiful children eager to learn. Check out some of the highlights. [View the story "NEA Back to School 2014: Texas" on Storify]