The High Cost to Public Schools of High Stakes Standardized Tests

(Adapted from a letter originally addressed to the State of Hawai‘i Board of Education)

Respected Board Members:

I am a “highly qualified” teacher with many years experience in the classroom, for the past three years at a Hawai‘i intermediate school. I served six years in the U.S. Navy and worked in the defense industry for five years before attending university and ultimately entering the teaching profession.

Like the vast majority of my colleagues, I am deeply committed to the well being of my students; I consider it my duty and calling to educate them for the life they have right now as well as for the life they imagine for themselves in the future. I am good at my job: good at opening students up to the joy of learning and discovery and exploration, good at helping them see why what they are learning should matter to them, good at helping them develop persistence and resilience and daring, good at encouraging them to see themselves as capable.

The high-stakes standardized tests I’m required to administer, however, don’t really assess my students’ growth as human beings or their mastery of the complex of skills I strive to teach; they are narrow, limited, and deeply flawed. Further, their primary purpose seems to be to provide “accountability data” on schools and teachers, but good students with good teachers at good schools do not always or automatically perform well on them—see for instance Mott Hall Bridges Academy in New York (“A Valuable School and Principal—But You Wouldn’t Know It By the Test Scores”).

With that in mind, here are my top ten problems with the high-stakes standardized tests currently so in vogue:

The test…

1. assesses a specific kind of test-taking skill. The new SBAC claims to require more than low-level, simplistic thinking, but in my experience what it mostly demands is incredible endurance.
2. serves no educational purpose. Although it labels students “proficient” (or, mostly, not) based on an ever-shifting metric, it isn’t about the students—it’s about assessing the effectiveness of teachers (again, with a very narrow definition of “effectiveness”).
3. lacks transparency. The test is administered by a company with a fiduciary responsibility to turn a profit. Test materials are proprietary intellectual property, and transparency exposes the company to potential loss.
4. unfairly penalizes schools that lack the financial resources to provide adequate technology for the test-taking enterprise. Slow or out-of-date computers, slow internet connections, insufficient numbers of computers, and more all take their toll.
5. negatively impacts instruction. Because the stakes (for schools and teachers) are so high, meaningful instruction is discarded to allow more time for “test prep” and testing itself.
6. demoralizes teachers and contributes to attrition among excellent teachers, many of whom cannot as a matter of conscience any longer subject students to “testing torment,” which robs them of the rich experiences necessary to become passionate and engaged learners.
7. steals an inordinate amount of time and attention from authentic teaching and learning. With stakes so high, the test becomes the be-all and end-all of so-called “education,” to the detriment both of education itself and education’s clients: students.
8. disengages students from school and learning, instead fostering an active animosity toward education and its institutions. Testing is utterly irrelevant to the “real lives” our students live, and when schools focus on testing to the exclusion of things that actually are relevant, students understandably stop caring.
9. sets a single bar for student “proficiency,” altogether ignoring all the myriad ways a human being can show not just proficiency but brilliance. Success, as defined by these tests, excludes almost entirely those fostered in the humanities and arts, yet success in the humanities and the arts is at least as important as success deciphering informational texts or constructing a mathematical formula.
10. demoralizes students. Students have a hard time separating a test score from their identity. When a student does not earn the coveted “proficient” rating on these limited, flawed, narrow tests, they believe that there is something wrong with them, when it isn’t them at all.

Testing is not a significant element of life outside the hallowed halls of education. Testing is not a significant part of any career. Testing is not even a major part of college. The tests a student might typically take in the course of a career or degree program are not like the tests we are forced to administer as part of so-called “accountability.” Testing does not make students more “college and career ready,” and more to the point it contributes nothing meaningful to the actual lives of students. Shouldn’t education ultimately provide students with something valuable in their actual lives as well as in their possible futures?

I believe we educators absolutely must remember that our clients—who we serve—are the students, not universities or employers or even parents. Those are all stakeholders, but they are not who we serve first and foremost. We owe our clients a “lifeworthy” education, one that is relevant to life as they already know it as well as how they hope it will be (“What’s Worth Learning in School?”), and testing as currently done is anti-lifeworthy…just ask our clients.

I thank you for your attention, and look forward to continuing our mutual service to the students with whom we are entrusted.

Sincerely,


David Negaard