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Commentary - Apr 17, 2005 - Printable Version
- No Testing Company Left Behind
by Robin Buckallew
Before you read this opinion piece, I want you to be assured of one thing: this piece is totally my opinion. I have no hard data to back it up, and it is based totally on anecdotal evidence and hearsay. So, if you feel so inclined to challenge my opinion with hard facts, feel free to do so. If the hard facts exist. From the data that I've seen out there, I suspect most of the hard facts (which seem to support every possible position on this topic, depending on who is presenting the facts) have been shredded, twisted, warped and manipulated to fit whatever political agenda is the current fashion. So much sense and nonsense has been written on the subject of No Child Left Behind and standardized testing, I thought, what the hell. I might as well throw my opinion in the ring. Because I feel that the focus in our schools today on standardized, one-size-fits-all testing is a big, big mistake. Oh, it sounds good - accountability. Students not getting out of high school if they can't pass a basic achievement test. Who could argue with that? I could. To begin with, let me regress. The year - sometime in the mid 1970s. The town - Edmond, Oklahoma. The event - the Iowa Tests of Basic Achievement. Back then, graduation was not tied to your success on these tests. These tests were just used by the career counselors to harass and annoy you with predictions and prognostications about what you would/could/should be when you grew up. We all dutifully filed into the assigned classroom, got out our number 2 pencils, and darkened in the appropriate circles beside whatever we thought the answer was to some question deemed essential to our future success. Then, a few weeks later, we were given the results, graded and evaluated and analyzed beyond recognition. As a result of this single test, I was told at that time that I couldn't recognize patterns, and should not go into any career field where pattern recognition was essential. This was the result of some seemingly meaningless questions in which you were given a picture of an unfolded box, and were supposed to predict the shape the box would be when it was folded. I didn't exactly skip over these - I just wrote down whatever I felt like. Nothing else on my test came back discouraging - but no patterns for me! I must admit, as a young teen, I actually believed this test had some magical ability to tell me about myself. I grew up believing I was pattern-recognition deficient. I planned things accordingly. Now, as a middle-aged woman, I have found to my surprise that I am actually very good at recognizing patterns. I can see patterns in history, in life events, in current events, and most of all in the natural world (an absolutely essential skill for an ecologist). So, I decided that the thing that I was deficient at was telling the shape of unfolded boxes. I decided that the test was able to tell that about me in only the narrowest sense. Only I was wrong. You see, I've spent a little time checking it out, and found out I actually can predict the shape of unfolded boxes. If I feel like it. The only thing the test identified about me was an attitude. I wanted to get on to the verbal parts of the test, which I considered more in line with my interests, I didn't see any real need to be able to determine the folded shape of unfolded boxes, so I didn't bother. So was the test useless? No, probably not. Only the analysis was useless. The test was administered and graded by people who felt that all teenagers of a certain age could be tested in the same method, and would respond identically to the same things. Any failure to perform meant a deficiency on the part of the student.
To give another example of my own experience with standardized testing. We are no doubt all familiar with the concept of the IQ test. Now, science has its own attitude toward IQ testing, and I won't go into all of that here. Let's just suffice it to say that this supposedly magical number is really not all that meaningful on a grander scale of things. The IQ test was initially developed to assist in identifying students who would benefit from additional help in school, not to pigeonhole everyone into a neatly labeled little box. Since that time, it has mutated into some sort of mystical number that tells us whether we will be successful or not. Most of us have at some time or other taken an IQ test, even if we have not been told what our IQ is. Most schools routinely give some sort of simple IQ testing to the students. One day, not too long ago, I took two separate IQ tests on the same day. What a lark. The first IQ test labeled me a genius. Wow! But don't worry, the second was much more humbling - it informed me in no uncertain terms that I was, indeed, a moron. Unfit to do much, I guess, except sit in the corner and drool and stare at my shoes? Well, in truth, I am neither genius nor moron. I don't know what my IQ is. I just know what I am capable of, and what my limitations are. That's all any of us should ever know. Knowing a number that someone tells us is our IQ can exert a profound influence on our life choices, and very often those choices may not be the best decisions we can make. Nor are they necessarily the same decisions we would make if no one had ever told us what our measured IQ is supposed to be.
All of this is leading up to my grand conclusion from all the experiences I have had, both as a student and as a teacher. Standardized testing is, in my opinion, nothing more than bunk. I teach students in a college classroom every day, and the students that come my way are those that have excelled on the standardized testing. This would, in many people's minds, indicate that these are the students who learned the most in the high school setting. This is not necessarily a given. I could tell you horror stories - in fact, I will. I have had students come into my classroom unable to tell me which sex has the uterus. On a pig anatomy test, I had students correctly identify the testicles of a dissected pig - then inform me the pig was a female. Many students have come into my class totally convinced that Shakespeare was an American (this, of course, could possibly just be misplaced national pride). You see, there is a wide gulf between learning and taking a test. Taking a multiple choice test can be, and often is, an exercise in method, not an exercise in knowledge. There are tricks that can be learned to take a multiple choice test, and some students are much better at learning these tricks than others. Not to say that none of the students who pass have learned the material - some have learned it very well. Sadly, so have some of the students who fail, but simply aren't adept at test-taking. Especially not high stakes, fail at your own risk tests such as the standardized tests that are being used as an excuse for accountability.
Schools are being put on the spot. Many schools are resorting to various types of tricks to make sure that students who are poor at test-taking are absent on the day of the standardized tests. There is some evidence that some scores have been altered. It is widely known that teachers are spending a great deal of their valuable classroom time teaching the students test-taking skills. Why? Because a school that fails to have a certain percentage of students pass the test at a set skill level will lose funding. They will have to send the students, and the funding, to a school that is passing. Many schools are already operating under conditions that make teaching and learning difficult. Schools in areas where students are all poor, where students lose a lot of sleep because they work long hours at night to supplement the family income, schools where students don't have a hot meal regularly, schools where students don't have a place to study.. These schools are given the exact same tests as the schools in the richest neighborhoods, the schools with brand new shiny paint and fancy computer equipment. Guess which schools are passing? Then, the parents are informed in end-of-the-world tones that the school their children are attending is failing. This, of course, leads to increased fear on the part of the parents that their children will have no real future to look forward to, and they panic and withdraw their child from that school. In reality, many of these schools may be failing because they simply started at a different gate. A student who has learned to read before he comes to school, who is in a home where there are lots of books and lots of chances to read and study, will naturally be at a higher level beginning school. A student who has not had these opportunities, through no fault of their own or their parents, will be forced into a form of competition, and will not be able to keep up. They may actually be gaining more from their education. They may come farther in the first year than a student who was already way ahead. But they might not come far enough to get even with the more privileged student, and as a result, their school will fail.
Most of the standardized tests have been designed with some sort of idealistic view of what a student should know when they get to a certain place in their schooling. These tests are often designed around middle-class suburban values and middle-class suburban expectations. They are designed to be taken by students in middle-class suburban schools. In short, they are designed for failure if you are not living in the middle-class suburbs. My son went to a school in the dead middle of Oklahoma City. It was a school that was attended by students from various socioeconomic settings, various types of neighborhoods, but they did all have one thing in common - they were working class or lower class families. My son had most of the advantages that come from having a mother with a college degree (except one - money). Whether you put it down to genetics or environment, he had a chance. He came from a long line of college graduates. He had warm meals, a roof over his head, he had a soft warm bed to sleep in, and plenty of quiet space to study. Quite a few of the other students at his school had those same advantages, those same opportunities. It seems like little enough. But there were a solid core of children at his school who did not have any of those chances. And what they faced when they got to school each morning was a large, impersonal structure, where they were forced to endure metal detectors and backpack searches. They were in classes that were much too large for one teacher to have any real one-on-one contact with them. In many of the classes, there weren't enough books to go around. My son's algebra teacher couldn't assign homework, because she only had enough books for them to use in the classroom, then they had to leave them for the next class. Can you imagine having to learn algebra without any chance to practice the problems? This was no middle-class suburb. And yet the tests they had to take at the end of the year were the same as were being taken in the middle-class suburbs in the next town over, where per capita expenditure is much higher, there are books enough to go around, and the students come from successful, upwardly mobile families. My son's school was listed as failing. The suburban school was listed as passing. I considered this rather a no-brainer.
In the last few years, there has been so much debate about the No Child Left Behind Act, but most of what I see in the media (both mainstream and alternative press) seems to center around the lack of funding provided. There is rarely any debate about the wisdom of the accountability process to which these schools are being subjected. Accountability is, after all, a good thing. I am not one to disagree. I think, perhaps, the main problem is the form that the accountability takes. This is not a one-size-fits-all world, and a one-size-fits-all solution is much like that one-size-fits-all swimsuit you bought last summer - it didn't fit you, it didn't fit your sister, and it didn't fit your best friend. In fact, you couldn't find anybody it fit. You ended up dumping it on the scrap heap, and went back to the store to get a swimsuit in your size. I say it's time to scrap the concept of standardized testing, and go back to a method that makes more sense. Let the teachers evaluate the students they have been teaching, that they have gotten to know. In my teaching experience, I have discovered some amazing things. By the end of a semester, I know my students. I know what they are capable of. I also notice that isn't always reflected in their test scores. Sometimes a student will be extremely bright, extremely capable, and extremely innovative in their thinking. They can't always take the test, that tries to fit their interesting and novel ideas into a conformist little box that is modeled on what someone else thinks they should be thinking about. Over time, these students often get frustrated with the system, and find themselves either faking their way through it, or dropping out. The world may have lost yet another original thinker to one-size-fits-all conformity. One thing we cannot afford to lose is original thinkers. I am given a great deal of freedom to take other factors into account besides just test grades when evaluating a student, and have on several occasions given a student a somewhat higher score than their test grades alone would indicate. By the same token, there are students who perform with near brilliance on the tests, but do not show any indication of the same level of ability and accomplishment in the everyday work of the class. They are very good at parroting back lessons without actually understanding the concepts they are learning.
The single best person to evaluate a student that has been attending regularly throughout the year is the teacher who has worked closely with them. I realize the protests this brings up - yes, sometimes the system is abused. Sometimes a teacher takes an irrational dislike to a student (and sometimes a student takes an irrational dislike to a teacher). Sometimes the teacher fails to appreciate the novel thinking of an original, creative student. Sometimes the teacher is tired, or cranky. Teachers are notoriously underpaid and totally underappreciated. Especially in the primary education system. But to turn huge amounts of taxpayer money over to test-making companies to create tests that are designed to prove that your teacher, your school, your child are a failure, is not the answer. Throughout the ages, the issue of teaching and the issue of evaluating students has been a difficult one. Throwing a standardized test at the problem is just another example of a failure of imagination and resourcefulness. I wouldn't expect our Congressional delegations to all achieve equally on a standardized Civics test - why do they expect our children to? I say we put the No Child Left Behind Act on Death Row, where it belongs, and call in our most original, creative, innovative minds to come up with a better system. Some of these minds may at this very moment be busily engaged failing a standardized test, condemning them forever to a life labeled as "stupid" or "incapable". I was lucky - I was simply told I couldn't fold boxes. Perhaps your child won't get away so easily.
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