Is ‘The Test’ failing American schools?
TRANSCRIPT
RELATED LINKS
GWEN IFILL: As Congress begins to tackle a new federal education law that would succeed No Child Left Behind, one of the major dividing lines is already clear. What is the proper role and use of testing?
It’s a question that has long touched a raw nerve among parents and educators.
A new book explores that controversy and testing’s possible future.
Hari Sreenivasan has our conversation from our New York studios.
HARI SREENIVASAN: On the one hand, parents know their children’s talents can’t be quantified by multiple choice tests. At the same time, they often want their children to do well on high-stakes exams.
A new book explores those issues and a growing backlash against testing in many circles. It’s called “The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have to Be.”
The author and NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, joins us now.
So, it’s been, what, a dozen years since No Child Left Behind, several years since the Race to the Top. Now we’re starting to roll out Common Core. And as soon as I say these phrases, there are parents that are just already bracing themselves. But our kids are not at the competencies that were the goal. And your book really says, in part, testing is contributing to the problem.
ANYA KAMENETZ, Author, The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have to Be: Yes, you know, it really is a case of big unintended consequences because tests were imposed to have some kind of system of equity and objective measures of how students were doing.
But because of the high stakes attached to them, districts and schools are increasingly spending more and more time prepping for the tests and also giving benchmark and interim exams up to a high of about 113 by the time students graduate.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, 113 tests just seems mind-boggling.
But we have done several stories about testing on the program. What is it in your research that you have found that most surprised you? Is it about the — sort of the industry that’s grown up around it? Is the variance in different states?
ANYA KAMENETZ: I think it’s — you know, considering the stakes, again, that we attach to these tests and the amount of stock that people seem to put in them, when we talk about data-driven decision-making and outcomes, as though this were some measure.
But, in fact, the psychometricians will tell you that the tests are being used in ways that they were never designed for, and that proficiency, which is dictated in the law, No Child Left Behind, doesn’t really have a single scientific definition.
And so there’s a real gap there, I think, between the level of science that we’re working with and then the decisions we’re making based on those measurements.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It seems the intention was noble, to try to figure out a way to measure the problem. You know, one of — the advocates for testings will say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Right?
So how do you know which schools are failing if you don’t know how the students are doing inside those classrooms?
ANYA KAMENETZ: Right.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, what happened from that noble goal to where we are now?
ANYA KAMENETZ: Well, the problem is exactly that.
There is so much that we don’t measure within schools, starting with subjects that aren’t math and reading. Right? These tests are math- and reading-based only. They don’t even test writing very much. So, there’s all this — besides all the other school Is ‘The Test’ failing American schools?: