Dumber by the Test

Overuse and misuse of standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum in our public schools.

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, for 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 reductionist. 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 (or group of scores) should ever constitute more than a small fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. There are simply too many other factors that must be considered, many of them beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

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. 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 from actual classrooms.

Bluntly stated, educators are running scared, faced with lawmakers, bureaucrats, and ideologues whose ramping up of standardized testing on a claim of “school improvement” is thin cover for a broad-scale effort to degrade public schooling and thereby validate the movement toward privatization. This takeover of public education is being orchestrated on the backs of children whose education is being impoverished, educators whose good work is under attack, and communities whose depressed education systems are graduating less well-educated students and, over time, whose schools will be seen as less attractive to potential new businesses. The health of a community’s schools and the health of a community’s business and industry run parallel. Indeed, the very fabric of our community is intimately connected to the wellbeing of our public schools.

Standardized tests do not improve education. Apart from their overuse narrowing the curriculum—dumbing down students’ learning—after getting test results education authorities at the state, and sometimes federal, level spend more time punishing schools and students that don’t do well (by taking over schools, for example), instead of spending time and money helping students and schools to improve. After all, in Indiana more than $46 million goes to testing, most of it paid to testing corporations, rather than to real school improvement. That’s a great deal of money that could be better invested in teaching than testing.

If our schools are to recover ground lost to over-testing, then mass standardized testing in the name of “school improvement” has to stop. There are better ways to use taxpayers’ money; there are more effective ways to use students’ learning time, and there are better ways to help teachers improve our schools.