Standardized testing
What's at stake in High Stakes
By Lyn
Neeley
Teacher at East Side Community H.S., New York
City
High-Stakes Tests produce a single numerical score to
determine if a student passes to the next grade.
Take this test:
High-Stakes Tests are valuable to public education because
they:
a. prepare students for high-paying jobs
b. help students pass high school
c. raise the teaching standards in public schools
d. develop "higher level" thinking
skills
e. are an accurate way of measuring intelligence
If you're having trouble choosing a correct answer, you're
not alone. The testing craze sweeping the country is full of
empty promises that right-wing educators, politicians and
testing corporations use to confuse the public.
Standardized tests are being used to dismantle free public
education, institutionalize racism and widen the gap between
social classes.
"My guess is that testing improves education the same way
that bombing promotes democracy," said Steve Cohn, an education
professor at Tufts.
Standardized tests are turning schools into corporations
where the bottom line is how well students do on the tests.
Instead of raising standards, High-Stakes Tests dull down the
curriculum--and the students' minds.
Creativity, reasoning and analyzing skills are sacrificed
when students are
for ced to memorize and regurgitate isolated facts and choose
only one right answer.
In order to pass the state-mandated tests, many schools are
eliminating art, music and physical education to make time for
test preparation classes that are more cost effective. Teachers
who have to "teach to the test" become automatons, spending
larger chunks of curriculum time giving tests and getting
students ready for tests.
In Montgomery County, Md., students spend 50 hours each year
just taking tests. And that doesn't include Advanced Placement
tests.
Caleb Rossiter, who teaches statistics at American
University, wrote, "If you could see how they waste students'
time with all this test prep--it's so disheartening."
Educator Peter Sacks explained, "Evidence strongly suggests
that standardized testing flies in the face of recent advances
in our understanding of how people learn to think and
reason."
One study showed that 77 percent of teachers feel that
standardized tests are not worth the time and money spent on
them. Many educators and reformers have developed alternative
methods of authentic assessment.
This kind of assessment, Sacks explained, is "the notion
that students ought to be judged on the basis of what they can
actually do, not how well they take tests. Also called
performance assessment, these methods can mean anything from
evaluating portfolios of student work or writing samples to art
and science projects."
Teachers are better than standardized tests at assessing the
progress of students.
Bush's hidden agenda
What's the real agenda behind the George Bush education
agenda, which he dubs "No Child Left Behind"? Without
mentioning any dollar figures, the plan calls for vouchers to
promote private schools, and for standardized math and reading
tests in grades three to eight.
It also promises to "reward success" and "sanction failure"
by introducing a program of merit pay for teachers and schools,
based on test scores. Thus the tests will be used to grade
teachers and principals, which the tests supposedly were not
designed to do.
High-Stakes Testing is cost effective. It serves as a smoke
screen for policy makers, politicians and the media--and the
business interests they all represent--to look as if they are
raising the standards and improving schools. It covers up their
failure to provide money for programs that would make real
improvements.
In fact, poor scores are being used as the rationale for
leaving many children behind by cutting resources and
privatizing schools, especially in poor, under-funded urban
school districts.
Teachers in New York City earn 25 percent less than those in
the suburbs. Not a big draw to attract highly qualified
teachers.
New York City's school districts received $8,213 per capita
for each student compared to the surrounding suburban
districts, which get $12,050 per student.
Money is needed for programs that are proven to help all
children succeed. A good teacher and a well-run school mean far
more to a child than another test. If public education is to be
improved, class size must be reduced, financial incentives
provided for the most qualified and experienced teachers. There
must be teacher-training programs. The number of teachers of
color must be increased.
The schools need up-to-date materials, much-improved
resources, more schools and better maintenance of school
buildings.
Testing flunks
The New York Times recently reported, "The testing industry
is coming off its three most problem-plagued years that have
affected millions of students who took standardized proficiency
tests."
Writing and scoring tests is a new quarter-billion-dollar
industry. It is dominated by four companies: CTB/McGraw-Hill,
Harcourt, Riverside and NCS Pearson.
To maintain profits these companies pay only $9 an hour to
employees who work 12 hours a day, six days a week. Employees
told the Times that they were "pressed to score student essays
without adequate training and that they saw tests scored in an
arbitrary and inconsistent manner. Lots of people don't even
read the whole test--the time pressure and scoring pressure are
just too great."
In Minnesota last May, 47,000 students received lower scores
than they deserved. Mistakes in the scores of standardized
tests were questioned in Michigan, California, Arizona,
Washington, Tennessee, Indiana and Nevada as well.
After lies and attempts to cover up its mistakes,
CTB/McGraw-Hill finally admitted to errors in scoring
standardized tests.
When Rudy Crew was hired as New York's school chancellor, it
was largely because he had engineered a big increase in
standardized test scores in Tacoma, Wash., in the early
1990s.
In 1999, Crew and the New York Board of Education decided to
raise the stakes for CTB test scores. Students who failed the
tests would be required to pass summer school or be held back a
grade. School principals and superintendents could lose their
jobs if students scored poorly.
When devastating results came back, it looked as if reading
scores had stagnated for two years. New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani fired Crew soon afterward.
Now it has been proven that 9,000 of the New York
schoolchildren who were forced to attend summer school in 1999
shouldn't have been there. They had been mistakenly scored too
low by CTB.
Built-in racist bias
African American and Latino students are disproportionately
failing standardized tests.
"It's revealing that standardized tests have their origins
in the Eugenics movement earlier in this century and its belief
in the intellectual superiority of northern European whites,"
Barbara Minor writes in "Rethinking Schools."
The "standardized tests didn't really exist until it was
decided that IQ and similar tests were a valid way to identify
'superior' and 'inferior' students," she continued.
"Standardized tests legitimize and preserve existing power
relations."
Recent studies show that people taking the SAT college
admission test will score an extra 30 points for every $10,000
in their parents' yearly income.
A study of California high-school students revealed that
parent education alone explained more than 50 percent of the
variation in SAT scores.
A principal at a school on New York's Lower East Side said:
"Let's be honest. If poor, inner-city children consistently out
scored children from wealthy suburban homes on standardized
tests, is anyone naive enough to believe that we would still
insist on using these tests as indicators of success?"
Standardized tests will prevent thousands of students from
graduating from high school, especially in under-funded urban
schools with predominantly students of color.
These young people will become members of the growing pool
of non-skilled, underpaid workers that capitalism needs to
maximize profits. Or they will become part of the profitable
prison-industrial population and receive no salary--creating
more wealth for the ruling class.
Emphasizing standardized testing does not train students to
be critical thinkers. A hidden agenda of the testing craze is
the movement to eliminate anti-racist, multicultural education
that arms young people with an understanding of themselves,
their cultures and the contradictions of being poor in the
leading industrialized country.
A hundred years ago capitalism needed to take rural
agricultural workers and turn them into a disciplined work
force to run its factories. That's when the promise of
universal, free education became a mandate.
Forty years ago, when businesses needed workers for an
expanding service economy, it produced a boom in community and
junior colleges.
But in today's high-tech society fewer educated, skilled
workers are needed. The main purpose of standardized testing is
to sort students according to criteria set by the bosses.
Take this test: What's at stake if the schools continue to
use high-stakes standardized testing?
Answer: A free, well-rounded education for all students.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page