Re-Blog - News on High Stakes Testing

Recently Marion Brady, a teacher, administrator, and curriculum designer wrote an article for the Washington Post When an Adult Took Standardized Tests Forced on Kids. In it she shares information she received from a friend who took the 10th grade test (this is the one that determines graduation, college potential, and of course teacher and administrator pay, and school funding).

The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”... “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate."...“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

In the article Marion Brady also discusses the recent New York Times story Principles Protest Increased Use of Test scores to Evaluate Educators by Michael Winerip.

"President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals’ revolt in history.As of last night, 658 principals around the state had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.Their complaints are many: the evaluation system was put together in slapdash fashion, with no pilot program; there are test scores to evaluate only fourth-through-eighth-grade English and math teachers; and New York tests are so unreliable that they had to be rescaled radically last year, with proficiency rates in math and English dropping 25 percentage points overnight.Mr. Kaplan, who runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, has been evaluating teachers since the education commissioner was a teenager. No matter. He is required by Nassau County officials to attend 10 training sessions, as is Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School here, who was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State.“It’s education by humiliation,” Mr. Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Standardized Testing

Generally speaking I'm against standardized tests.  It's not so much the idea of state wide assessments so much as the way they're carried out.
Here's a collection of links that help explain the different types of tests and why I'm opposed to them.

Mother Jones - Education: Standardized Tests, Explained

USA Today - Five Years After NCLB took effect, problems remain

New York Times - Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math

Fair Tests - What's Wrong with Standardized Tests?

High Stakes Testing are Standardized Tests that are used for grade promotion, scholarships, determining teachers’ salaries, and funding.  NCLB makes the States Standardized Tests tied to the schools' Title I funds and whether the schools might be taken over or sold to private companies.  Individual states tie their testing to other benefits and reprisals.  Massachusetts requires all students to pass the sophomore level state test to graduate and scholarships to state colleges and universities are partially based on a student's score.  Meanwhile, Florida bases teacher's salaries on the testing abilities of students.

On some level a lot of the basis of High Stakes Testing makes sense, as does the consequences.  Most problems arise from implementation.  Firstly, the tests are often partially biased, both culturally and in an individual day to day manner.  Students from the suburbs test better because of the wording.  When I did an assessment of a test for second graders one section had picture analogies.  These were meant to test students reasoning skills, and ideally they were using everyday objects.  However, if you like in a city and don't have a yard you're not going to get the relationship between a rake and trowel or sprinkler and watering can.  Or if you do it takes longer to come up with the comparison because these are not objects you'll be personally acquainted with.  These biases exist in all tests and are the reason that students from the mid-west score better on the ACT than they do on the SATs, while the reverse is true for students from the East Coast.

Meanwhile, simple things like amount of sleep, whether a person ate breakfast, has a head ache, or numerous other small differences effect how a student scores.  This also ties into larger biases when students live in poorer areas and 80-90% of students are on free or reduced meals.  Something that might affect several of students from one area, and make them perform more poorly on the tests, is part of the daily lives of the majority of students from other schools.  Add the fact that many of these Title I schools are in urban or extremely rural areas and suffer from the biases of the test construction and it becomes apparent that some schools and districts go into High Stakes Testing already behind the curve, and these schools are the ones reliant on government funds to meet the varied needs of their students.

Often these schools are forced to devote a good deal of their time preparing students for the Tests, so subjects like history, science, and foreign languages are over looked.  Students also learn how to answer multiple choice questions or word short answers to get more points, but they have no meaningful understanding of the material they're learning and often have difficulty applying it to other scenarios.  There are scenes from Season 4 of The Wire that are almost identical to what some teachers and students experience, and it's heart breaking.

Another mark against High Stakes Standardized Testing is that they don't properly account for students with special needs.  Under NCLB schools may exempt a certain percentage of their students from the tests for reasons are special needs.  However, this percentage is far less than the 20% of students with ADHD and the 10-15% with learning disabilities that require extra time or other accommodations to test at their actual achievement level.  Also students who speak English as a second language must take the State Tests after being in US schools for two years; however most of these students are not proficient enough to score well in this time frame.  One of my friends works as a bilingual school in New York City, and from kindergarten to 5th grade they transition the students from speaking primarily Spanish to having full English comprehension, and this time frame is rather necessary when students come from homes that don't speak English.

And all of these reasons are why I find the tests themselves biased and therefore damaging to students and American schools.  These articles and what I've written barely touch on the consequences of these tests.