April 2008 — News
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Accountability, Yes. Teaching to the Test, No.
After all, repercussions involving funding are involved. This is unfortunate, as the narrowing affects our ability to teach the whole child, which should be the mission of our public schools. We hear of increased teacher stress as they work with students to prepare them for those tests and their frustrations when students fail again. Yet, those same students might have made great strides with their teacher when you make the comparison to what students knew at the beginning of their courses. There are statements on other ways for students to demonstrate what they have learned, such as project-based learning and using portfolios. I agree that both are valuable and might be considerations, but at present the process for evaluating those alternatives, the man-power to do so with rubrics applied fairly, and the additional cost to do so are not in place.So, we are left with an imperfect system for measuring outcomes of learning for public accountability. We use the most efficient, cost-effective form with the multiple choice format, free response, and essays in writing. Questions are field tested so that the final test is valid and reliable. Some of those tests might not yet be good, and it is probably true that when too many students start to get a particular question right, the question is replaced. We have misused and abused standardized tests to a point where we've lost site of the purpose of testing. Standardized tests can't possibly measure all that we value for students to know and be able to do. But, if you can set aside NCLB for a moment, there is a valuable place for them. If results inform instruction and tell the teacher that a student does not have basic skills in some area deemed essential, isn't that important to know for intervention to be provided? The era of "passing the buck" is gone.
Douglas Reeves (2004, cited in Deubel, 2007) provided good advice: "Even if the state test is dominated by lower-level thinking skills and questions are posed in a multiple-choice format, the best preparation for such tests is not mindless testing drills, but extensive student writing, accompanied by thinking, analysis, and reasoning." My guess is that test prep strategies used by many run contrary to his statement. This is not to say we should omit teaching test taking strategies, and taking practice tests. Students should know what to expect. The key is proper balance and remaining ethical in our test prep strategies (e.g., see Mehrens, 1989; Washington Educational Research Association, 2001).
Bottom Line
I doubt readers oppose accountability--proof that students have met standards. Objections lie in how we are going about gathering the proof and the current emphasis on outcomes from single tests, rather than using a spectrum of possibilities. The problem is not standardized tests per se, but the inappropriate uses we've made of results. There is some good news on the horizon, however.
