Obama's Empty Testing Talk
The president's pledge to reduce school tests is meaningless.
Over the weekend, President Barack Obama received high praise from parents and teachers foracknowledging that testing is taking too much time away from teaching, learning and fostering creativity in schools, and recommending that standardized tests take no more than 2 percent of total school instructional time. Frankly, this is arrant nonsense. Here's why.
From time to time, I'm asked to give a talk about education. If I look at how I spend my time over the course of a year, giving presentations and speeches is a very small part of my job – less than 2 percent. However, if my effectiveness were to be judged on the audience response to those handful of talks I give each year, I'd spend a lot more time writing and practicing speeches. I'd fret endlessly over my PowerPoint slides and leave-behinds. I'd sprinkle in more jokes to be entertaining; I'd probably say whatever I thought would get audiences to like me more, rather than challenging my listeners. I'd definitely spend a lot more on suits and dry cleaning than I do now.
But most critically, I'd spend far less time on all the other things I do – writing, reading, teaching and learning, visiting schools to stay current – that might make any talk I give worth listening to in the first place. In short, if this minor part of my job, however useful, were to become the alpha and omega of how my effectiveness is measured, it would quickly change nearly everything else about my work. And not necessarily for the better.
It's the same with testing. First of all, reports that Obama "plans to limit standardized testing to no more than 2% of class time," are simply wrong. The federal government has virtually no say about how much time schools spend testing. The vast majority of tests that our children take are driven by states and school districts, as well individual schools and teachers, not by Washington. The best the president can do is use the bully pulpit to encourage less testing and even then there's reason to be skeptical.
The amount of time kids spend on testing is not the issue. It's what the tests are used for that matters. Like my speech example, when you use standardized tests to make high-stakes judgments about schools and teachers, they are no longer a mere diagnostic. The testing tail wags the schooling dog.
"I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, thereby demonstrating that the administration doesn't understand or thinks it can elide the effect of testing on schools. If there are stakes attached to those tests for schools or teachers, then there will be little or no change in current classroom practice.
To be clear, I am not anti-testing. Far from it. The data from tests are the life-blood that courses through the arteries of much that matters to me in education and efforts to improve it. Test data have created the demand for school choice and charter schools. They supply the proof point demonstrating how poorly we've historically served low-income children of color. The field of education simply cannot advance without testing, which provides one of the few empirical bits of data we have to give insight into the effectiveness of changes in any number of school-based inputs, from curriculum and teacher preparation to education technology and standards.
But one would have to be cynical or naive not to understand that the moment you use tests, which are designed to measure student performance, to trigger various corrective actions and interventions effecting teachers and schools, you are fundamentally shifting tests from providing evidence of student performance to something closer to the very purpose of schooling. This is precisely what has been occurring in our schools for the last decade or more. When parents complain, rightfully so, about over-testing, what they are almost certainly responding to is not the tests themselves, which take up a vanishingly small amount of class time, but the effects of test-and-prep culture, which has fundamentally changed the experience of schooling for our children, and not always for the better.
The Obama talk on testing seeks to curry favor with parents and teachers (and their unions) while doing nearly nothing to change the fundamental role of testing and its effect on schooling. It's all well and good to "encourage" states, districts and schools to limit testing, but as long as test-driven accountability measures, which are driven substantially by federal law, are used not to provide Obama's School Testing Talk Is Meaningless - US News: