Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms
In "The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing — But You Don't Have To Be," veteran education reporter Anya Kamenetz investigates the $2 billion dollar standardized test industry.
Testing is thoroughly entrenched in the American education system. Students in grades three through 10 spend up to 25% of the year engaged in test prep instead of actually learning, she reports.
All the test emphasis warps the classroom dynamic, Kamenetz writes. Teachers have to teach to the test, and students have been known to throw up due to test-reality anxiety.
It's scary stuff.
We talked with Kamenetz about where standardized tests came from, why they sound good in theory but are toxic in practice, and what the alternatives are.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
BUSINESS INSIDER: Why are standardized tests such a problem?
ANYA KAMENETZ: There's a saying in social science that when you make a measure into a target, it stops being a good measure. Any measure you attach stakes to, people are going to be incentivized to manipulate it. The Atlanta cheating scandal is an example of teachers going the extra mile to fabricate test scores.
More and more research shows that we need our schools to prepare students for careers where they're going to be creative, innovative, team players, collaborative, good communicators, and the tests that we're giving students today measure none of those things, so we're actively discouraging the best teachers and administrators from doing the work they think is most important, and we're discouraging experimentation at a time where it's really sorely needed.
If you want students to be able to do jobs that don't exist today, then centralized planning and an outdated set of measurements to try and reach that outcome is going to be misguided at best.
There are people who believe "this is rigor" and we need to have a standard to measure those that far below the bar, but the question then becomes, is it better to have a metric that's totally meaningless but applies fairly to everyone, or is it better to pick and choose and be a little more individualized with the metrics that you're applying?
BI: Sounds like there's an impulse of fairness involved.
AK: It didn't sound that bizarre when George W. Bush came to Washington with this idea that he had originally implemented in Texas, and Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, signed on to this idea [of No Child Left Behind], because there was a bipartisan consensus that it was a good idea to apply the same high standards to everyone. But the problem was, there was such a huge gap to that rhetoric that sounded really good and the reality of what that actually might mean.
BI: Where did standardized tests come from?
AK: The original observation that most, if not all, human behaviors can be described by distribution along the bell curve dates back to the 1700s. It was originally applied in astronomy, for the purpose of increasing the accuracy of scientific observations. But what happened is that as many critics have really argued over the years, psychometrics was really invented, it was co-opted by inventors into a larger project of proving that the ruling class was always meant to be the ruling class.
Francis Dalton, who created many foundational social science techniques, also coined the term "eugenics." His fundamental belief was that intelligence was fixed, that intelligence was inherited, and that intelligence was a single quantity inside the human brain.
BI: How is that present with us today?
AK: It's easy to confuse people's circumstances with their innate merit. That's kind of the definition that we've been stuck with all these years. Yet SAT scores and scores on tests that kids take today are so highly correlated with family income and with race. We know now that that is a measure of social advantage, not innate ability.
Yet we accept the idea of an achievement gap. It's not in any way an achievement gap. It's an advantage gap. The idea that these scores are applied to children as though they define the children instead of defining the children's circumstances is something that recurs again and again and is not helpful.
What we're trying to assess through process of education is what people can do and how people can change. What we want know about is their motivations, their interests, what's going to get them from here to there, how hard do they try, what are their resources, what are the levers inside the kids that's going to lead them to succeed and do their personal best, and these are the qualities that great teachers are oriented to discover, and our standardized tests don't do that. They're much more concerned with labeling people in a fixed way, and that's what they've always been designed to do.
We want to affect people's understanding of their role in the world, and if they apply themselves and invoke maximum effort they're actually going to be able to get results, and the people who believe that and have the support to do it do overcome their circumstances and their background. That's what innovative educators are really trying to look at.
BI: What's an example of that?
AK: Predictive analytics. Many students today are interacting with software and creating millions of Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's classrooms - Yahoo Finance:
