America’s reliance on standardized tests is creating a generation of intellectual infants
Can President Obama revolutionize the American education system before he leaves the White House? Probably not. But his “Testing Action Plan,” or TAP for short, is a step in the right direction.
On Oct. 24, the president took to Facebook to announce TAP, a new set of education guidelines that will reduce the amount of class time spent on standardized test preparation. The three-pronged guidelines prescribe reducing the amount of tests to those that are “worth taking,” that “enhance teaching and learning,” and that use evaluation as just one component of education assessment. After all, “learning is about so much more than filling-in the right bubble,” as Obama concluded at the close of the video.
Critics point out that the Obama administration has largely perpetuated the culture of over-testing through federal mandatesinaugurated by the Dubya years (something which Arne Duncan, the president’s outgoing secretary of Education, fully concedes to doing) and that the TAP guidelines are “vague.” Then there’s the rather glaring fact that the education system has become so ensnarled in the for-profit testing industry that we can’t imagine what the school day would be like without test preparation and test taking, or how to finance the system without the industry. The Common Core is big business. As David Dayen for Salon notes, the Big Four private companies—Pearson, ETS, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill— “have spent over $20 million lobbying the government between 2009-2014, insisting on more testing to boost their profits … The testing sector generates $2 billion in annual revenue, so the return on investment is excellent.”
Corporate welfare, in other words, depends on the continuation of the culture of over-testing—the buying of test prep books, the hiring of tutors, and so forth. When education relies on a corporate industry to this extent, large-scale changes may indeed bring some amount of change.
As a college professor who has witnessed the deleterious effect of a test-focused education in her 10 years in the classroom, I can say that Obama’s call for revising standardize testing standards is a welcome and necessary change. Education is, at its heart, designed for a noble purpose: to create thoughtful, independent citizens of the world. School should be about learning to think critically—not learning how America’s reliance on standardized tests is creating a generation of intellectual infants - Quartz: