It’s Education Week, a week of lectures and panels put on by the D.C. Schools Project and D.C. Reads, and Georgetown students have been exploring issues like racial diversity, income inequality, and immigration status in an educational context. These events are making me impatient to graduate and, if I’m lucky, to start working as a teacher. But as motivated as I am now, a few worries are putting a damper on my excitement. Jokes about the meager salary that awaits me aside, it’s hard for me not to think about some of the big-picture problems that aren’t being adequately addressed by politicians and education policy makers.
One key issue: I’m not thrilled about the sad reality that, if I work in a public school, my students will inevitably have to undergo a battery of standardized tests at various points throughout the academic year. In the D.C. Public Schools, for instance, second through 10th graders devote two weeks to the series of tests known as the DC CAS. Kids as young as seven are made to sit at their desks for half the school day, for days on end. (As a tutor with the D.C. Schools Project, afterschool programming on these days was usually devoted to playing Guess Who.)
What’s more, if I’m a really unlucky teacher, my school district might tie test scores to how much I get paid, or even to whether I get to keep my job. With IMPACT, DCPS’s teacher assessment system, 50 percent of my final score would be determined by my students’ test results. This “value-added” model measures, in effect, the amount of knowledge that a teacher can put into his or her students’ heads, which is unfair to teachers for a number of reasons.
First is that standardized tests aren’t really representative of all the learning that goes on in a classroom. Students do master concepts in class, but they also gain knowledge, skills, and habits that can’t be tested in a multiple-choice format. Besides, a classroom where the teacher is an information authority, bestowing knowledge upon students whose minds are merely blank slates, probably shouldn’t be our goal.
Standardized tests are also really hard—not only because they’re drawn-out and mentally taxing, but also because they’re biased, operating on the idea that students coming from diverse families all have the same background knowledge. But a kid from a working-class home in Columbia Heights isn’t going to have the same sorts of basic cultural assumptions that one from an upper-middle-class family in Potomac does.
The value-added approach linked to these high-stakes tests creates a situation in which teachers’ job security depends on students’ test scores—the ultimate incentive to teach to the test, sapping part of the fun out of teaching. Federal policies which force schools to emphasize test scores, like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, overstate a teacher’s ability to overcome outside challenges that accompany students to school: Some might arrive hungry and unable to focus, for instance, or having not slept properly because of parents’ unpredictable work schedules, or completely lacking support at home from caregivers with the time to practice literacy and math skills.
The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, unanimously voted at its last convention to adopt a resolution stating that standardized testing is undermining education. And at this point, it doesn’t seem like anybody is really arguing that standardized testing is a reliable way to evaluate students’ abilities or teachers’ effectiveness; they’re mostly just saying that it’s the most efficient option. But if we take shortcuts in educating our youth, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t achieve everything we hope they will as adults. Critics of American public education often point to Sweden or Finland as models of academic excellence—a problematic comparison, given vast differences in demographics and citizen perceptions regarding the role of government—but we can find examples of better options than standardized testing here in the U.S. as well. FairTest, a Boston-based organization which promotes unbiased testing, mentions Wyoming and New York as home to districts which have developed alternative solutions. There, student assessments consist of four or five distinct tasks which use a combination of measures to provide a more complete picture of students’ progress.
Recent months have seen backlash from teachers and parents. One teacher has begun selling wristbands emblazoned with the words “Just Let Me Teach.” Another recently wrote an article in which he calculated that his classroom spent 738 minutes over three weeks preparing for and administering the tests. A Florida mother launched the website “Testing Is Not Teaching” in response to standardized tests.
These three individuals aren’t the only ones realizing that we need to find a better way to make sure our schools are best serving our children—they’re part of a growing movement pushing for less testing. Groups opposed to standardized testing are up against federal laws like No Child Left Behind and plenty of politicians and policy makers claiming to have kids’ best interests at heart.
After spending two summers teaching a class of 11 adorable seven-year-olds, I can’t wait to get back into the classroom. But it seems clear to me that while standardized tests may be ostensibly meant to ensure quality education for students, overemphasizing them does far more harm than good.
