Testing, So Much Testing
A search for the meaning behind the rampant assessments in America’s schools
On Saturday, President Obama posted a high-profile video message to Facebook in which he called on schools to reduce the amount of standardized testing taking place in classrooms. Critics of overtesting generally support the proposal, which reinforces what seems to have been the U.S. education system’s gradual, uneven, and often tacit withdrawal from aggressive, assessment-based accountability. In many ways, the plan amounts to the White House’s long-anticipated, albeit anti-climactic, response to what’s become a particularly fraught era in public education. The past few years have been characterized by mass opt-outs, a patchwork of state legislation to rein in rampant testing on their home turfs, and all kinds of assessment-related technological glitches and logistical snafus (one of which is currently playing out across Florida).
But Obama’s announcement of the so-called “Testing Action Plan” wasn’t the only piece of news to hit the anti-testing world this past weekend. It coincided,not uncoincidentally, with the release of a compelling report by Council of the Great City Schools—an influential Washington-based group that has generally supported testing—which offers the latest piece of evidence that government-driven school reform has taken things too far. The report identifies significant redundancy in the exams being administered in 66 urban U.S. school districts, finding that, between prekindergarten (yes, pre-k) and 12th grade, U.S. public-school students each take roughly eight mandatory standardized tests annually, many of them stipulated by No Child Left Behind.
.@POTUS has a pop quiz for parents & teachers.
Watch him share smarter ways to measure our kids' progress in school.
https://t.co/xBfPWbNCTo— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 26, 2015Adding to that news twofer, a number of recent reports help confirm critics’ doubts about the integrity of test scores as a tool for measuring student achievement. American Institutes for Research published a study on Monday highlighting inconsistencies between the Common Core standards, which are adopted at the state level, and the separate National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a set of federally sponsored exams that’s administered consistently across all 50 states. The Urban Institute’s Matt Chingos has just authored a somewhat similar report outlining the “promises and pitfalls” of the NAEP scores, too. “NAEP scores,” he wrote, “have been misused as long as the test has been given.”
As it happens, the newest NAEP report was published Wednesday, and it shows a decrease in fourth- and eighth-graders’ math scores—the first decline since 1990. (Eighth-graders’ reading scores also took a dip, while those for fourth-graders remained stagnant.) In response to the results, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said: “Not only is there plenty Obama Responds to Testing Fatique, Widespread Opt-Outs, the Accountability-Driven Reform Movement - The Atlantic:
