Like I said, Testing is Bullshit

I don't know where to start. I've written a lot about testing, and by testing I mean the Big Standardized tests (BS tests, h/t Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social) that are required by school bosses local, state, and federal. I started teaching high school in 1994, and within the first few years I had gotten a master's degree and achieved National Board Certification. 

Then, in 2001, the world began to change. No Child Left Behind, they called it, and in the beginning it involved simply making your standards and objectives concrete and observable by writing them on the board or posting them in the room, a practice that helped teachers, students, and administrators figure out what should be going on in the classroom. 

If I remember, we started with about two or three BS tests a year: a high school exit exam and I guess the (P)SATs plus AP tests. In 1997 we started with the STAR tests in reading, writing, math, history, and science. That was a big step, but I think it took about a week and then we could get back to class. There was also something called a Stanford 9, but I don't remember why.

In 1999, test scores began to be used to calculate something called an "Academic Performance Index" used to rate and rank schools for "extra assistance" but mostly punishment. In other words, "ACCOUNTABILITY."

After that, it felt like testing, along with its evil offspring testing prep, testing PD, testing visits to the principal's office, seemed to explode like a fast-growing cancer, consuming all the healthy cells around it and squeezing every other purpose of schooling out of the school day. In my opinion, in my experience, it ruined school. 

So, in other words, I hated testing, and I hated what testing did to students, to parents, to teachers, to administrators, to schools, and to schooling. 

I've spent a lot of time hating testing, and for thirty years I have been itching to take all the Aspen Instutitionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling consultant-bots that ever walked in without a week's experience in the classroom, and I wanted to put them in a big bag and beat them with a baseball bat. 

Which makes this next part hard. Here's a guy who claims to have seen the light. He claims to have come to the realization that testing may not only not be the answer, it may even be a little bit--gasp!--bad for kids. Not to mention everyone else. 

Much like Never-Trumpers who ignored all the warnings from people who were right about the right all along (h/t Driftglass  @driftglass.bsky.social), and now offer their critiques as if they are original analysis, Mr. Ross Wiener has come to the realization that he may have been wrong, even though he insists his heart was in the right place. What he doesn't say is that teachers were right all along.

I say that's cold comfort to the thousands and thousands of kids denied a full, humane, robust, sometimes fun education because their educational captors were busy puking test score bullshit all over each other at the retreat. I'm bitter because my colleagues and I and teachers across the country were forced to implement a program WE KNEW WAS BAD FOR STUDENTS, and when we objected we were threatened and mocked and challenged over our commitment to our students. My friends still in the game are still facing that crap right now, today. And yeah, I'm still pissed.

But I search deep in my own heart and I find just a spark of forgiveness. Maybe we accept this reversal like it's a good faith confession. Maybe we just take the win. BUT...

I would like to see some proof. I would like to see this Aspen Instutitionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling former consultant-bot do just one thing: 

WORK AS HARD FOR AS MANY YEARS ON KILLING THE TESTING CANCER AS YOU WORKED ON SPREADING IT. 

Then, maybe, redemption.

You can read it here for yourself. If it all sounds so familiar you want to beat somebody with a ball bat, I get it. 

 Testing! Testing! Testing! 

"It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers."

Yes. Yes it was. Mr. Wiener goes on: 

But there was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished? I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores. I went to my boss’s office to discuss it, expecting her to help me push back, but she confirmed it was true, and always had been. If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?

Years later, research from the University of Chicago Consortium would show that schools’ effect on students’ social well-being and work habits predicted academic gains about as well as test performance did, and was more predictive than test scores for students’ graduating from high school, enrolling in college, and staying out of the criminal justice system.

Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not — the practical, civic, relational and developmental — was pushed to the margins. 

 

 

 

 

Above I said I'd written a lot about testing. Here's some of it:

In "The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Testing. Obviously"  about the effects of testing on working conditions and the teacher shortage.

In "Back to School: It's the tests" I wrote about the impact of pervasive testing on the school calendar.

In Data is bullshit. Part One I wrote about how the tests do not generate "data," they generate test scores from assessments given over several days under different conditions. Schools generate tons of data; test scores are among the least valuable.

In "Data is bullshit. Part Two: What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard," I wrote:

If there’s no schoolwide plan to address issues revealed in the data and no time carved out to analyze the data and formulate a set of strategies (maybe during one of the thousand “not this again” PDs), then the school is profoundly unserious about data and is not advancing the interests of students but simply using the testing for some other purpose."

 In "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part one" I wrote about how the tests don't measure what they say they measure.

In  "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part two" I wrote about the testing PDs and how destructive they are.

And finally, and absolutely worst of all, I wrote about the pernicious and abusive practice of collecting data on our students through all these testing and testing preparation programs in "Test Scores are bullshit. Secret data is evil bullshit."