Power, Politics, and High-Stakes Testing: Part 2

Note: This is the conclusion of a two-part post.

Part 2: Rhetoric and Political Power

Strip away the rhetoric used to describe high-stakes testing as a mechanism for school reform and the raw goals of such testing are revealed to be political power and ideological dominance. Authors Madaus, Russell, and Higgins (2009) comment that “high-stakes tests empower policymakers, who control the content and form of the test, to shape what and how teachers teach and students learn” (p. 101). The real bullies in education aren’t on the playground but in Congress, the statehouses, and similar seats of political and bureaucratic power.

The maxim that what gets tested is what gets taught is reified in a narrowing of the school curriculum in proportion to the amount of testing imposed on schools by federal and state mandates. High-stakes tests require an extraordinary, exclusionary focus if schools are to ensure their students’ success—not in terms of actual learning but rather in test-taking. To focus so much time on one subject, or narrow band of subjects, means that other subjects are pushed to the periphery because schools lack the capacity (time and money) to expand the school day in order to accommodate this added focus and still have sufficient time for other subjects.

One recent nationwide indicator is the Department of Education report, Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10 (Parsad, Spiegelman, and Coopersmith 2012). This is the decade of NCLB and it echoes still and, in fact, even more loudly. Comparing arts education availability from studies a decade apart, researchers found that visual arts instruction in elementary schools had declined from 87 percent to 83 percent, dance from 20 percent to 3 percent, and drama/theater from 20 percent to 4 percent (p. 5). Secondary school arts fared similarly: visual arts down from 93 percent to 89 percent, dance from 14 percent to 12 percent, and drama/theater from 48 percent to 45 percent (p. 9). Music across the decade stayed roughly the same at both levels.

Arts organizations decry the trend away from arts education, which has proven links to higher-level thinking and the advancement of learning in other subjects. CCSS skews learning, arguably as much as or more than previous standards movements because the Common Core is linked to and advanced by narrow standardized testing.

While political rhetoric flips logic on its head to assert that high-stakes testing leads to school improvement and higher student achievement, the facts are starkly at odds with this idea. Funding testing at the federal and state levels is a multimillion-dollar enterprise that shunts much-needed money into the corporate coffers of test developers, producers, and scorers and away from districts and schools, where it could be better used to improve instruction. Mandatory testing, which is sold to the uninformed public as good policy for schools and students, is not about education but competition—and a fundamental remaking of public education into a narrowly defined, corporatized, politicized form that is anything but “public” in a positive sense.

References

Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum. (2004). The Committee of Ten. Columbia, Mo.: Author.

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, Bulletin, 1918, No. 35. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education.

Madaus, G.F.; M.K. Russell; and J. Higgins.  (2009). The Paradoxes of High Stakes Testing: How They Affect Students, Their Parents, Teachers, Principals, Schools, and Society. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Parsad, Basmat; Maura Spiegelman; and Jared Coopersmith. (2012). Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

States’ Impact on Federal Education Policy Project (SIFEPP). (2009). Federal Education Policy and the States, 1945 – 2009: A Brief Synopsis. Albany: New York State Archives. http://www.archives.nysed.gov

Common Core: 5. Standards and Standardization

In developing the Common Core State Standards the idea of standards has been confused with standardization. No one disagrees that standards for teaching and learning are needed. In the modern era American schools have always had standards, and those basic standards have not changed dramatically over the course of the past century. Universally the public wants schools to teach students to read, write, and compute at competent adult levels by the time they graduate.

At various times these 3R’s standards have been broadened to include more subjects, such as the sciences, the arts, social studies, physical education, and in various eras under a variety of labels manual arts/industrial education, cooking and sewing/homemaking, typing/computer science, and others.

When standards cease to be seen as basic goals toward which students and teachers should strive and instead become requirements that all students must meet, then a tipping point has been reached. Standards morph into standardization, which is detrimental because it means that students cease to be individuals with unique needs, interests, capacities, and desires. They become components in a corporatized system that demands conformity and uniformity. All the holes are round in this machine-like system, and students who are square pegs must be reshaped to fit.

The conflation of standards and standardization is reinforced by standardized testing, which has already spread to an unprecedented extent throughout American education. The Common Core promises more of the same.

“High stakes” tests are those that have a direct bearing on a student’s future. For example, in Indiana IREAD-3 is a high-stakes test at third grade because it determines whether a student will be retained in grade or allowed to advance. The Indiana Department of Education should make no claim—though it does—that this test is research based. Holding back students who fail IREAD in fact ignores a large, longstanding body of research on the detrimental effects of grade retention. For modest, short-lived gains in reading achievement, grade retention dramatically increases the probability that a student will drop out before completing high school.

IREAD standardization, like that of many high-stakes tests, is based on faulty logic. In truth, students learn to read at differing rates, some earlier, some later. While reading proficiency by third grade is a reasonable goal, it is not a make-or-break deadline. Treating it like one is foolhardy and dangerous.

"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.