Obama’s stunning reversal on standardized testing: Why his latest comments could spell doom for “reformers”
The president came out last weekend against the overemphasis on testing, breaking with 20 years of precedent
The activist/performance art group The Yes Men’s signature technique is to impersonate corporations or governmental agencies. They’ve posed as representatives from Dow Chemical, offering to liquidate their company and distribute funds to victims of the Bhopal disaster, or as officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, announcing the reopening of public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Through these hoaxes, the Yes Men publicize destructive policies and picture a world where they can be reversed.
That’s what I had in mind when I read that the Obama Administration called for a cap on standardized testing of no more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time, acknowledging their own role in endorsing a culture of constant test-taking. I simply assumed that The Yes Men had struck again, spoofing the Administration and calling attention to their education reform policies.
But that wasn’t an impersonator but President Obama himself saying that “learning is about so much more than filling in the right bubble,” and that it “takes the joy out of teaching and learning.”
Rigorous testing was so fundamental to the Obama Administration’s education reform agenda that this repudiation resembles shutting down Obamacare or the EPA’s carbon pollution regulations. Leveraged by Education Department policies like Race to the Top, which trickled out conditional funding, more states evaluated its teachers by factoring in test scores, and incorporated additional tests through the new Common Core standards.
As a result, teachers spent more and more of their school days preparing their classes to fill out Scan-Tron sheets, and less time on more rewarding pursuits like teaching critical thinking or triggering long-lasting interests. According to a survey of 66 districts by the Council on the Great City Schools, students now take an average of 112 required standardized tests between kindergarten and 12th grade, or over eight and a half every year.
Many of these tests fulfill federal mandates, from Race to the Top to the No Child Left Behind to Common Core. Eighth-grade students exceeded the Administration’s proposed limit of 2 percent of instruction time per year just on testing, to say nothing of the time spent teaching to the tests.
Most important, none of this testing appears to achieve the goal of creating more knowledgeable students. The Council on the Great City Schools study found no relationship between testing and reading and math scores on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between fourth and eighth grade. The tests do more to help administrators’ claim that they are demanding “strong standards” than they do to actually instruct children.
What’s the other byproduct of excessive testing? Financial windfalls for the four private companies who create and administer the tests: Pearson, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill. These four firms have spentover $20 million lobbying the government between 2009 and 2014, insisting on more testing to boost their profits, according to the Center for Media and Democracy think tank. The testing sector generates $2 billion in annual revenue, so the return on investment is excellent.
