High-stakes testing is a flawed idea. Students must work year-round to study for just one test that determines high stakes decisions, putting an extreme amount of pressure on all students. These tests influence such decisions as the hiring and firing of teachers and administrators, the closing of schools, and the livelihoods of teachers and administrators. They are touted as a way to make our education system “measure up” and to become the best in the world, but just testing more is no way to improve education.
Testing does have a place in education, among a variety of assessment options, as one indicator of student achievement. How we go about assessing student learning in an intelligent, valid, and reliable way is open for debate, but it is difficult to argue with the fact that high-stakes testing is not telling us what we want to know about education. It is completely ludicrous to grade individual teachers, administrators, schools, and even whole districts on the performance of students as young as 8 years old once per year!
There are very few things in life that are based on a single item. Some may argue that a job interview is one, but that is incorrect. If the determination of whether you got the job depended just on one piece of documentation, such as your resume alone, then it would be comparable. Instead, with a job interview, we look at transcripts, resume, letters of recommendation or references, as well as portfolios of work and often an in-person interview. Using one of these documents alone would not be sufficient or satisfactory, so we should not do the same thing with education.
The pressure high-stakes tests put on young students is driving them away from education. Horror stories abound of students getting sick on test day, missing school, and students crying the day of the test. What are our students learning when we do this to them? How transferable is this skill (if you can call it a skill)? Even if teachers and administrators work diligently to ensure that the students do not feel pressured, they do not succeed. Young people are incredibly adept at judging a situation and feeding off the vibes in the room, and no matter how hard they try, our teachers and administrators are unable to completely conceal their stress.
There has been an outcry in recent years that we need accountability in education, but, ironically, there is nobody that is able to hold the testing companies accountable for producing valid and reliable instruments. The testing companies keep their tests behind a veil and do not allow anyone to verify that the actual test questions are appropriately worded, written at grade level, that possible responses fit the question, or that there is only one correct answer. When test questions have been released, there have been a myriad of these exact problems found with them. So what are we actually able to ascertain about student learning from standardized testing? Not much at all. What is the damage we are doing to our students? It is yet to be seen but will no doubt be egregious.
The biggest thing that I think is wrong with public high schools today is the trend toward high-stakes testing. I do not think that it is a good assessment of how much students know and I think it is damaging to the students both directly and indirectly. I think that if you tell students to take a test on which so much hangs in the balance, it could be graduation, passing a grade, or just the future of your education, is not just wrong, it’s immoral. Just because a student gets a bad grade on one standardized test does not mean hardly anything about that student. Any number of factors could have gone into a bad test performance on that given day. Yet that test score can haunt them throughout their educational career. It does not mean that a student does not know the material, or is stupid, or even that they are a bad test taker. It simply means that they did not do well on that particular test. High stakes testing puts unneeded stress on both students and teachers. I believe that this can take much of the enjoyment out of education and schooling. Most students when they know that the only reason they have to learn something is so they can regurgitate it onto a standardized test have no drive to learn anything. I think without the standardized tests teachers could teach more to their student’s interests and the students would be more engaged and excited to come to class. Also, these tests have implications for teachers such as raises, keeping a job, and various other things. This detracts from a teacher’s ability to teach because it makes the teacher just as stressed and nervous about the tests as the students. This takes away from the teacher’s effectiveness.
ReplyDeleteI think that if the powers that be continue to insist on high stakes testing, they should at least alter the format. They should offer essentially the same test several times over the course of a few months and average student’s scores to eliminate single test day anomalies. In a laboratory setting, which is essentially what educators are trying to create with standardized tests, we do not run just one trial and call that our result. We run the exact same experiment countless times and find trends and averages and use those as results. If you only run one test, and the result of that test is a statistical outlier, then you draw incorrect conclusions and use these incorrect results to make important decisions. To me this is just illogical.
Well said Gingerbear!
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