"Truth" Really?

Like his fellow travelers in the radical right school bus, Tony Bennett muddles his facts, sometimes completely obscuring them under a dense cover of neoliberal ideology. When he refers to “truth” in his online “The Truth About Testing” (http://www.doe.in.gov/achievement/assessment/truth-about-testing), the best that can be said is that he is being disingenuous. About the only thing he gets right is the grades at which testing takes place. That’s in the first paragraph. It’s downhill from there.

Let’s look at just four of Bennett’s “truths.” The first is that students spend no more than six and a half hours each year in testing. That’s more than the equivalent of a full student learning day devoted to test-taking alone. Bennett is arguing that this amount of testing time is miniscule over the course of a 180-day school year. What he fails to take into account—purposely, one must believe—is the amount of teacher, student, and administrator time that must be spent preparing for and administering the multiple tests that “take fewer than six and a half hours.”

With reading and math as the focus of high-stakes testing, it’s not unusual in some schools, particularly in the elementary grades, for teachers to spend three or more hours each day on these subjects, effectively shortchanging students in all other areas of the curriculum, in order to ensure acceptable test scores. So let’s multiply 180 by 3. Now we’ve added 540 hours to Bennett’s modest six and a half. According to Bennett, a typical 180-day school year provides “a minimum of 900” hours of instructional time. If prep and administration time is added to the period from “Please begin” to “Put down your pencils,” quite a bit more than half of a student’s year is spend on standardized testing—learning restricted to a narrow band of over-tested, over-emphasized skills at the expense of breadth and depth that used to be the hallmark of American education. As I’ve written previously, this amounts to dumbing down the curriculum in the name of school improvement.

Bennett sees this as a virtue, sees “teaching to the test” as a positive. Another “truth” he would have us believe is that “we should encourage teachers to help students meet the state standards and learn the content we believe will be fundamental to success in life.” I’m not sure who the second “we” is here. It’s certainly not me. I believe, along with many parents and nonparents alike, that “we” would best serve students—our future informed citizens after all—with teaching that goes beyond simple reading and math skills to engender deeper understanding of text and mathematical abstraction and knowledge and understanding in science, government, the arts, physical education, health, and much, much more.

Yet another “truth” Bennett claims is, “The data [from standardized tests] help educators assess those students’ weaknesses and offer tailored instruction to help them get up to speed.” Clearly, Bennett does not take into account that most standardized tests are administered in the spring, making the results unavailable to shape instruction during the year of test administration. It might be argued that the results, paltry as they are, in very general terms could be used to tailor instruction, but probably not for the students who actually took the test.

Finally, let’s talk money. Bennett admits that Indiana spends $46.2 million dollars on testing. His justification is that Indiana has to do so in order to receive federal money that amounts to much more. And, after all, that $46 million is less than one percent of the “total state budget.” It’s like the old saw that you have to spend money to make money. His economic footnote, however, points out that the federal dollars come through Title I and IDEA, both of which require assessments. However, the required assessments can and do vary considerably from state to state, and none is required to be “high-stakes.”

While in the great sweep of government finance $46 million may indeed be a drop in the bucket, in real terms it’s more than $124,000 per Indiana school district on average. If educators were getting a real return for that level of investment, then I might argue that it was money well spent. However, given the limitations of our informational return on investment and the vast amounts of undocumented time accompanying actual testing—time that isn’t free, incidentally—I have to conclude that most of the $46 million is ill spent. To be blunt: wasted. Like much of the time spent in test prep that might otherwise be devoted to higher-quality teaching and learning. These are truths, for me, that are hard to ignore.