As I begin to prepare for the Graduate Record Examination in the next month, I realize that every epoch of my life reduces pathetically into the preparation for some sort of standardized test. My life has been a string of them: the RAVEN, the CTBS, the WASL (twice), the ITBS (also twice), the SAT, the ACT, and now the GRE.
To even speak about all these tests makes me sound like some sort of junkie, desperate for another hit of the newest designer drug named in an opaque string of alphanumerics.
It’s as if education in America has somehow devolved into just another competition for status, where legions of obsessed statisticians pour over rankings and esoteric numbers, hoping that the copious fields of information will suddenly organize into some divine revelation. Meanwhile, in classrooms across the country, teachers are hobbled time and time again as they are told not to teach their students how to think, but rather how to superficially glean data and select the one right answer and discard the rest.
It should be worrisome that education in America has become merely an exercise in briefly considering a highly constrained set of options and selecting one. Call me old fashioned, but education should be about teaching children how to think, analyze, discuss, argue, consider, probe and examine. I don’t want students to merely select the “right” answer; I want them to select an answer, any answer, and then to explain and argue why that answer is correct, using all the analytical, creative and intellectual resources available to them. And if standardized tests do one thing, it is fail to reward students who are trained to do exactly this.
I don’t want to say that standardized tests are all bad. After all, test creators have never claimed that tests provide anything other than “achievement scores” and “performance rankings.” Rather, it is the administrators and policy makers who are destroying education through the use of standardized tests.
Standardized tests, supporters argue, provide a set of measurable goals that can be used to aid students’ academic development through targeting weak areas that must be improved. The concept, “standards-based education,” calls for clear and concrete standards of achievement and high expectations of students.
Tests themselves, then, are intended within standards-based education as a diagnostic by which students are declared to have reached a certain point on the educational ladder, as it were. And, to the degree that a student fails, problem areas of learning are revealed and subsequently addressed. In theory, then, standardized tests do what they should: serve as one diagnostic aid among many that helps teachers more effectively nurture understanding and growth in students.
In practice, however, this is hardly the effect that tests have. Were standardized tests used only in the strict sense that the theory espouses, i.e. merely as diagnostic devices and nothing more, the public opposition to standardized tests would hardly exist to the extent that it does today. The unfortunate reality is that standardized tests are used in far more detrimental ways by administrators and policy makers.
What I refer to, of course, is the troubling trend of using achievement on standardized tests in ways that have little to do with targeted education. Congress’s 2002 “No Child Left Behind Act,” for example, financially penalizes schools that score low on state-required standardized tests in consecutive years. And in many states, Washington among them, it is now mandatory for tenth- or eleventh-graders to pass a state-wide test to even receive a high school diploma.
The increased pressure on students to perform well has already crippled teacher’s abilities to teach creatively. Now the nation is on the cusp of further forcing oppressive conformity on teachers with the advent of performance pay in districts across the nation from Denver, Colorado to Washington, D.C. While it is true that teachers across the country desperately need and deserve pay increases, most performance-pay schemes directly tie raises to increased performance on standardized tests, yet another pressure that causes “teaching to the test.”
I can’t help but feel that we do great violence to education when we subjugate it to petty competition for achievement, status and rankings. The highest goal of our educational system should be to teach critical and effective thinking and communication. If standardized tests interfere with the pursuit of learning, we should eliminate them and not vice versa. Testing is an aid, nothing more. It’s time for teaching to retake the classroom.
