Fighting the tests a practical guide to reseuing our schools

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 82, Issue 5, 2001, Pages 349-357

  Kohn, Alfie ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039180001     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (37)

1. A study of math scores on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that a combination of four variables unrelated to instruction (number of parents living at home, parents' educational background, type of community, and state poverty rate) explained a whopping 89% of the differences in state scores. In fact, one of those variables, the number of students who had one parent living at home, accounted for 71% of the variance all by itself. See Glen E. Robinson and David P. Brandon, NAEP Test Scores: Should They Be Used to Compare and Rank State Educational Quality? (Arlington, Va.: Educational Research Service, 1994). The same pattern holds within states. In Massachusetts, five fac-tors explained 90% of the variance in scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, leading a researcher to conclude that students' performance has almost everything to do with parental socioeconomic backgrounds and less to do with teachers, curricula, or what the children learned in the classroom.
2. See Kevin J. Clancy, Making More Sense of MCAS Scores Boston Globe, 24 April 2000, p. A-19. Another study looked just at the poverty level in each of 593 districts in Ohio and found a .80 correlation with 1997 scores on that state's proficiency test, meaning that this measure alone explained nearly two-thirds of the differences in test results. See Randy L. Hoover, Forces and Factors Affecting Ohio Proficiency Test Performance available at http://cc.ysu.edu/~rlhoover/OPT. Even a quick look at the grades given to Florida schools under that state's new rating system found that no school where less than 10% of the students qualify for free lunch scored below a C, and no school where more than 80% of the students qualify scored above a C.
3. See Jodi Wilgoren, Florida's Vouchers a Spur to Two Schools Left Behind New York Times, 14 March 2000, p. A-18. Then there is the SAT, which, far from being a measure of merit (sometimes pointedly contrasted with affirmative action criteria), is largely a measure of family income. Break down the test-takers by income, measured in $10,000 increments, and without exception the scores rise with each jump in parents' earnings.
4. See 1999 College Bound Seniors' Test Scores: SAT FairTest Examiner, Fall 1999, p. 13; the information is also available at www.collegeboard.org.
5. The nature and extent of those flaws vary with the nature of the testing program, of course. Exams that are norm-referenced, timed, composed largely of multiple-choice questions, given to young children, or designed to measure the short-term acquisition of isolated facts and skills are particularly unhelpful.
6. See Judith L. Meece, Phyllis C. Blumenfeld, and Rick H. Hoyle, Students' Goal Orientations and Cognitive Engagement in Classroom Activities Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 80, 1988, pp. 51423. The correlation was .28, significant atp < .001.
7. The middle school students who value literacy activities and who are task-focused toward literacy activitiesgot lower scores on the CTBS reading test. See Eric M. Anderman, Motivation and Cog-nitive Strategy Use in Reading and Writing paper presented at the National Reading Conference, San Antonio, December 1992. The same pattern showed up with high school students taking the SAT. Researchers classified students' approaches to studying as surface(doing as little as possible and sticking to rote memorization), deep(understanding ideas and connecting new material to existing knowledge), or achieving(trying to get good grades and beat everyone else, without interest in what was being learned). It turned out that those who adopted a surface or achieving style did the best on the SAT. SAT scores were negatively correlated with a deep approach to learning. See Cathy W. Hall, Larry M. Bolen, and Robert H. Gupton, Jr., Predictive Validity of the Study Process Questionnaire for Undergraduate Students College Student Journal, vol. 29, 1995, pp. 234-39.
8. It would be instructive to see a poll that measured familiarity with the tests as well as attitudes about testing and then looked at the interaction between the two. But we do not have to speculate about the effect of becoming familiar with alternatives to standardized tests. A survey of parents of third-graders in an ethnically diverse, working-class district near Denver found higher levels of support for performance assessments than for standardized tests, once the former option was presented and explained. Parents in this study were shown examples of standardized test questions such as How much change will you get if you have S6.55 and spend $4.32? a) $2.23 b) $2.43 c) $3.23 d) $ 10.87as well as performance assessment questions such as Suppose you couldn't remember what 8 x 7 is. How could you figure it out?A large majority of respondents preferred performance assessments. Indeed, many remarked that the latter were more challenging and gave teachers more insight into what the students understood and where they were struggling. The researchers admitted being surprised that parents rated informal sources of information -talking to the teacher and seeing graded samples of their child's work-as more useful than standardized tests for learning about their 'child's progress in school' and even for judging the 'quality of education provided at their child's school.' Clearly, they concluded, parents' favorable ratings of standardized national tests do not imply a preference for such measures over other less formal sources of information.See Lorrie A. Shepard and Carribeth L. Bliem, Parents' Thinking About Standardized Tests and Performance Assessments Educational Researcher, November 1995, pp. 25-32.
9. See Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Scliools (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000) or chapter 4 of The Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), from which much of the former book was adapted.
10. See, for example, Peter Sacks, Standardized Minds (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1999);
11. and Kathy Swope and Barbara Miner, eds., Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2000). For background information about these tests,
12. see Gerald W. Bracey, Put to the Test: An Educator's and Consumer's Guide to Standardized Testing (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa International, 1998); and any of several publications by W. James Popham.
13. Harvey Daniels, Whole Language: What's the Fuss? Rethinking Schools, Winter 1993, p. 5.
14. See Merle B. Karnes, Allan M. Shwcdel, and Mark B. Williams, A Comparison of Five Approaches for Educating Young Children from Low-Income Homes in The Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed.,/U the Twig Is Bent... : Lasting Effects of Preschool Pivgrams(Hillsdale,N.J.: Erlbaum, 1983), pp. 133-69.
15. Hilton Smith, Foxfire Teachers' Networks in John M. Novak, ed., Democratic Teacher Education: Programs, Processes, Problems, and Prospects (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 29.
16. See Käthe Taylor and Sherry Wallon, Children at the Center: A Workshop Approach to Standardized Test Preparation, K-8 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998);
17. and Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman, A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests: Knowledge Is Power (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998).
18. Several articles in the December 1996/January 1997 issue of Educational Leadership are also relevant.
19. LindaM. McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 204, 203.
20. Jonathan Kozol, Foreword to Deborah Meier, Will Standards Save Public Education? (Boston: Beacon, 2000), p. x.
21. LynnOlson, Worries of a Standards 'Backlash' Grow Education Week, 5 April 2000, p. 12. Note that even the headline of this article assumes that a backlash against the standards-and-testing movement is something one should worry about rather than welcome -a bias reflected in most coverage of the issue.
22. No single test score can be considered a definitive measure of a student's knowledge so an educational decision that will have a major impact on a test taker should not be made solely or automatically on the basis of a single test score. Other relevant information about the student's knowledge and skills should also be taken into account according to Jay P. Heubert and Robert M. Hauser, eds., High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999).
23. For example, one Republican state legislator in Delaware announced: I cannot support, under any circumstances, a test that will be the be-all and endall of a student's [getting a diploma]. So why don't we just remove that? How have we ever got to the point where we allow one test to determine our children's future?At that point in the debate, according to a newspaper account, several in the chamber spoke of how they had successfully moved from high school through college to even advanced degrees without having to pass a single, difficult, standardized test. Others recalled conversations with teachers who admitted they would not be successful taking the tests themselves. 'It seems like we're trying to treat the symptom instead of the disease,' remarked another Republican representative, adding, The problem is the testing.See Tom Elder, Education Bill Passes Delaware House Delaware State News, 17 March 2000. Similarly, Pennsylvania's state board of education ruled out a test to determine whether students would receive a diploma, with one board member commenting, I couldn't sit here in this seat and take that kind of decision out of the hands of teachers who had worked hard with the students for 13 years.See Christopher Newton, State Education Board Rules Out High School Test Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 April 2000.
24. This argument in particular resonates with peo-pie across the political spectrum.
25. For more on this point, see The Schools Our Children Deserve, chap. 2.
26. For further thoughts on helping educators to become more adept at political organizing, see Ellen H. Brinkley and Constance Weaver, Organizing for Political Action: Suggestions from Experience in Kenneth S. Goodman, ed., In Defense of Good Teaching: What Teachers Need to Know About the Reading Wars(Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998), pp. 183-90.
27. This letter appears in W. James Popham, Testing! Testing!: What Every Parent Should Know About School Tests (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), p. 284.
28. One rather tentative bumper sticker now being circulated asks, Is Standardized Testing Hurting Our Kids?A more decisive one features the initials of the state's test in a circle with a red diagonal slash running through them, followed by: These Tests Hurt Kids!Meanwhile, some educators have printed up t-shirts that read, High Stakes Are for Tomatoes.
29. Scott G. Paris et al., A Developmental Perspective on Standardized Achievement Testing Educational Researcher, June/July 1991, p. 17.
30. Anne Davis, Executives in West Bend Struggle with Sample of State Graduation Test Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 20 January 1999.
31. Stephen Hegarty, Officials Dodge FCAT Dare St. Petersburg Times, 13 February 2000.
32. On the respects in which standardized testing is most damaging to low-income and minority students, see Kohn, The Case Against Standardised Testing, chap. 4; idem, Standardized Testing and Its Victims Education Week, 27 September 2000, pp. 60,46,47; Swope and Miner; and McNeil.
33. See Catherine C. Lewis, Educating Hearts and Minds: Reflections on Japanese Preschool and Elementary Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 201, To.
34. Jane Coles, Enough Was Enough: The Teachers' Boycott of National Curriculum Testing Changing English, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 16, 23.
35. This account is based on Robin Lord, Harwich Teacher Refused to Hand Out MCAS Test Cape Cod Times, 3 June 1999; Ed Hay ward, MCAS Opponents Hold Rally in Hub Boston Herald, 16 May 2000; and personal communications. Bougas received a two-week suspension without pay in May 2000, but, at this writing, still has his job: Several other Massachusetts teachers have also refused to administer the MCAS, so far without repercussions.
36. For example, www.stopopts.org in Ohio; http:// personal.cfw.com/~dday/VASOLs.html in Virginia; www.xfcaïTcom in Florida; www.geocities.com/nccds/ index.html in North Carolina; www.taasblues.com in Texas; www.castausa.com in Nevada; www.cpog.org in Georgia; www.fairtest.org/arn/masspage.htiiil in Massachusetts; www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap. html in Michigan; and www.stopAIMSnow.org in Arizona.
37. Tracy Van Moorlehem, Students, Parents Rebel Against State Test Detroit Free Press, 29 April 1998, p. 1-A. Overall, those opting out of the test tend to be average or above-average students some of w horn wore t-shirts that urged their peers to just say noto the test, Moorlehem reports. In response to the students' actions, state officials did not reconsider the value of the tests but began offering students substantial scholarships for high scores. K