Common Core: 6. Overuse and Misuse of Standardized Testing

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, research, and so on. But the wholesale use of mass standardized testing—essentially every student in every school—and the misuse of test results to judge individual students, teachers, schools, and entire districts is simplistic and simply wrong. Complex qualities such as student achievement, teacher quality, and school and district effectiveness cannot be reduced to a number or a set of numbers. No test score should ever constitute more than a tiny fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. Too many other factors must be considered. Many of them—such as the effects of poverty—are beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

The Common Core State Standards eventually will come with matching standardized tests to reinforce the standardization of this national curriculum. Whether CCSS tests will replace state tests, such as ISTEP and IREAD in Indiana, or add yet another layer of testing on top of them is still an open question.

Either way, as standardized tests proliferate, teachers concentrate more time (often required by their supervisors) on direct test preparation, drilling their students on a narrow set of tested concepts and shunting aside richer learning opportunities that may, in fact, be lost forever. Education researcher Qiuyun Lin comments, “Standardized tests create a system of education that reduces student learning to scores on a single test, rules out the possibility of discussing student learning in terms of cognitive and intellectual development, growth, social awareness and social conscience, and social and emotional development” (in “Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform.” Action in Teacher Education 23 (4): 43-49).

Over-testing limits students to acquiring basic knowledge at the expense of skills such as critical and creative thinking. When the goal is to determine answer A, B, C, or none of the above, there is no place left in the curriculum for students to develop higher-level thinking. So-called 21st-century skills don’t make the cut, however much they are touted by pundits and policymakers far away from actual classrooms.

University of Colorado researcher William Mathis comments: “As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself” (in Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking, http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/options). Indeed, CCSS is likely to require added funds from cash-strapped states and local districts, further reducing resources for programs that increase educational equity and broaden access to learning.

Furthermore, the Common Core has been criticized by some, for example in Indiana, as actually offering less rigor than current state standards in language arts and mathematics. This concern alone should give readers pause. Is lowering standards really school “improvement”?

Ultimately CCSS must be questioned for its very foundation. Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris, authors of The Myths of Standardized Tests (2011) write concerning the barrage of standardized tests in the United States that NCLB was only its “most recent, and most punishing, incarnation.” The same terms apply to the Common Core. The one-size-fits-all philosophy of standardization says, much as the Committee of Ten did in 1892, that a single academic curriculum is suitable for all students—no exceptions—and will guarantee that every one of them will be prepared “for success in college and careers.” Succeeding generations found the Committee of Ten’s nineteenth-century philosophy seriously deficient, and there is no reason to believe that the same philosophy put forward now as the Common Core will prove to be any more successful in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, CCSS is likely to reduce the quality of education for all students.