| This article originally appeared in The Philadelphia
Inquirer on January 29, 2001, under the title "Test, Test, Test:
Sounds Great But Ignores Kids."
Please Don't Test Them Every YearBy Jill Hacker
In the education package he delivered on Tuesday, focusing
particularly on poor children, President Bush proposed testing
public schools annually and making federal money available to
parents who remove their children from poorly performing public
schools. All this echoes his campaign promises.
But high-stakes standardized testing could undermine the very
education we need to improve. And tying funding to test scores would
press teachers, especially those who work with poor children, to
teach only rote, when they could be opening children's minds and
guiding them to explore their world.
High-stakes testing programs seek to force improvement in
education. The assumptions: Rewarding or punishing teachers and
principals for their test results can improve learning - and the
best basis for teachers' decisions is not training and experience
but the need to pass a test.
What do educators say about high-stakes testing? A position paper
issued by the National Council of Teachers of English states flatly,
"Raising test scores does not improve education" and "high-stakes
testing often harms students' daily experience of learning,
displaces more thoughtful and creative curriculum, diminishes the
emotional well-being of educators and children, and unfairly damages
the life-chances of members of vulnerable groups."
The International Reading Association "strongly opposes
high-stakes testing." George Mason University's position paper says
that Virginia's Standards of Learning tests "overemphasize low-level
factual information, defining knowledge as inert rather than as a
quest of disciplined discovery."
High-stakes testing forces rote teaching and squeezes out
learning - including research projects, presentations, field trips
and even the reading of literature - that cannot be reduced to a
testable, scorable bite. This effect hits poor areas worst, in
schools where scores tend to be lowest and pressure to improve is
greatest.
Consider the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests. In
their extensive study of the TAAS system, involving interactions
with hundreds of public school teachers over 10 years, Linda McNeil
and Angela Valenzuela found that in Texas's poor, historically
low-performing schools, TAAS is undermining education. In the months
before TAAS exams, teachers are forced to drop subjects such as
science and history that are not TAAS tested and instead concentrate
on dumbed-down TAAS prep versions of math and English. In one
low-performing school, the pressure to spend school resources on
TAAS preparation was so great that the school "spent $20,000 (almost
its entire instructional budget) for a set of commercial test-prep
materials."
McNeil and Valenzuela report that after years of learning from
TAAS reading materials and preparing for TAAS essays, some middle
school children are unable to read a novel even two years below
grade level. "Writing--as it relates to thinking, to language
development and fluency, to understanding one's audience, to
enriching one's vocabulary, to developing ideas--has been replaced"
by writing to TAAS' prescriptive essay format.
Bush speaks of leaving no child behind, yet his policies would
hold back exactly those already at risk. The harmful effects of
testing programs hit hardest at schools in disadvantaged areas,
where because of underfunding and language problems students tend to
score most poorly and therefore be subjected to the most
test-oriented coaching in place of real learning.
To label a school a failure, withdraw funding, and encourage
parents to withdraw their children will leave only a demoralized,
publicly humiliated school staff and an empty school building.
Threats to punish the school will press teachers further to "teach
to the test" and cover up the system's real problems.
In the name of accountability, the testing movement seeks to use
tests to force students, teachers and administrators to improve
education - but real improvement can happen only with changes to the
system: smaller classes, better pay for teachers, more respect for
the teaching profession so that it can attract brighter young
people, more classroom space, better-maintained buildings, and more
parent involvement. Too much emphasis on testing diverts children
from developing the creativity, sticktoitiveness and problem-solving
skills they will need to meet the challenges of their new world. It
redirects children's energies to the drudgery of drilling basic
skills for no further purpose than to pass a test.
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