I've written several times about the savage testing regime that has gripped U.S. education the last twenty-plus years and about the bogus data it generates. This post looks specifically at how testing and its diabolical siblings, standards (generally some iteration of the Common Core Standards) and accountability (h/t Steve Nelson via @nancyflanagan), function as weapons in the War On Teachers.
Testing stands at the center of the evil trinity--standards, testing, and accountability--and acts as a transformer taking the energy stored as potential in the standards and delivering it as kinetic in the sorting system of accountability, a system whereby certain students, teachers, and schools are glorified and the rest labeled as "failing" and punished.
It's a crazy circular shell game where each part of the trinity only exists because of the other two, and underneath it all is the assumption that teachers are not doing their jobs.
We need standards because teachers are not teaching.
We need tests because we have standards.
We need scores because we have tests.
We need rankings because we have scores.
We need consequences because the scores "prove" teachers are not teaching.
Rinse. Repeat.
- We want to look like we're serious about education so we need to ensure teachers are teaching.
- Therefore we create standards so we can hold students, teachers, and schools accountable.
- Then we test to see if students are meeting the standards.
- We use the scores to punish teachers and schools for not meeting the standards we created.
- See? We are serious about education!
How does this cerberus of testing function as a weapon in the War On Teachers?
1. It narrows the curriculum.
The devotion to Big Standardized Testing (h/t Peter Greene @palan57) strangles the curriculum leaving only certain kinds of knowledge, expressed only in prescribed ways, as legitimate--and measured.
As Alfie Kohn described it in 2001: "From high-quality high school electives to focused discussions of current events (such as last November’s historic election), some of the richest learning opportunities are being squeezed out."
To defend standardized testing, you are likely to hear some version of business management guru Peter Drucker’s assertion that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I once heard “We measure what we value,” which I thought was ridiculous because my students and I valued respect, collaboration, flexibility, curiosity, creativity, humor, persistence, and lots of other things depending on the day.
None of these ever showed up on the standardized exams--not that I’m discussing what did show up because, of course, that would be breaking the oath they make us all sign to protect the market share and business model of testing companies.
We value what we test because we can easily measure it. Over the last two decades, schools have come to value only what they measure, and we've mostly only measured English and math. Not art. Not theater. Not music. Not dance. Not even history. In California we dabble with science (though not in the Big Smarter Balanced "SBAC" Summatives), but only because, when reminded that the testing is flawed because we only test English and math, their answer was "Then let's find a way to test more."
All this testing results in an impoverished curriculum, not simply in the subjects emphasized but also in the broader, more potent sense of "curriculum" which considers "all aspects and dimensions of the educational experiences which pupils have during any period of formal education, and of their underlying principles and rationale" (A.V. Kelley, The Curriculum: Theory and Practice).
The Standards that dictate curriculum are bad enough in and of themselves, but once they are run through the test compactor things only get worse. From Peter Greene in 2019:
In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.
I would argue--and have--that the Standards are like air cover for the BS Test blitz. The Enemies of Public Schooling and their collaborators invented a rationale--Common Core--then they use it to justify the entire testing-industrial complex.
An important 2007 report written by JenniferMcMurrer for the Center on Education Policy and based on CEP's "nationally representative survey of 349 responding school districts" found that "about 62% of districts reported that they have increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02 (the year NCLB was enacted), and more than 20% reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school since then."
In order "[t]o accommodate this increased time in ELA and math," the report found that "44% of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) at the elementary level."
Corresponding data from middle and high school was not included, likely because of the lack of schedule flexibility and graduation requirements.
However, the study did take note of important changes taking place beyond elementary school. Describing a table titled "Changed Their Curriculum to Put More Emphasis on Content and Skills Covered on State Tests Used for NCLB," researchers found that "[a]t the middle school level, about 43% of districts reported that they have changed the English language arts curriculum to a great extent, and 42% said they have changed the math curriculum to a great extent to put greater emphasis on tested content and skills." And "[t]he responses were very similar in these subjects at the high school level."
Just a note: The percentage of districts reporting some level of curriculum shift was 90%.
Additional notes: The shift toward time spent on tested subjects was significantly greater in "districts with at least one school identified for NCLB improvement." Furthermore, "Districts with at least one school in improvement also reported in greater proportions than districts without schools in improvement that they have decreased time in social studies, science, and art and music." (emphasis mine)
And the curriculum has not just gotten narrower, but thinner as well as schools have devoted more time to test prep "and skills covered on the state tests used for NCLB."
In his study titled “High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis” published in Educational Researcher in 2007, author Dr. Wayne Au has this to say:
"The primary effect of high-stakes testing is that curricular content is narrowed to tested subjects, subject area knowledge is fragmented into test-related pieces, and teachers increase the use of teacher-centered pedagogies."
Of course, you know this. It was true in the mid-2000s and it's true today. Whatever Common Core may have meant in the imaginations of hopeful teachers and some of its architects ("designed to help students grow as thinkers"), when standards are fed into the Big Standardized Testing Pulverizer, teachers are often left "bereft of joy in their profession."
There is no dimension of the curriculum--not the formal curriculum, not the informal, not the hidden curriculum, not the planned curriculum and not the received curriculum, that is not negatively impacted by our testing obsession. And because of the incessant focus on two specific areas, English and mathematics, all other dimensions of schooling, from social studies to chess club, suffer from atrophy until they shrivel up and die.
All this is to say that no, it's not a dream. The testing monster really has eaten a lot of what we used to call school and a lot of what students used to love about it. For the best teachers, those who don't believe that the things on the Big Standardized Test are the only things worth learning, who believe that we are being stripped of something valuable beyond words, it's nearly impossible to endure.
2. Testing is a huge time suck.
Not only has testing narrowed the curriculum by shifting instructional time to tested subjects, the tests themselves and the attendant preparation for them devours whole weeks of class time.
Teachers are profoundly aware that simply getting to know 30+ human beings (times five, at least) and getting them pointed in a meaningful direction and figuring out what each of them needs in order to make progress in that direction--takes every minute of every day.
Now ask teachers to spend a large chunk of that time going in an entirely different direction and you know what they have? A lot less time.
For example, a 2015 study from the Council of the Great City Schools, which describes itself as a coalition that "brings together 78 of [the] nation’s largest urban public school systems," found that "In the 2014-15 school year, 401 unique tests were administered across subjects in the [then] 66 Great City School systems" and that "Students in the 66 districts were required to take an average of 112.3 tests between pre-K and grade 12." This number did not include "optional tests" or other teacher- or school-developed tests.
An average eighth grader spent over four days taking these mandated tests, and that "does not include [extra] time to administer or prepare for testing, nor does it include sample, optional, and special-population testing," which anyone can tell you is where the majority of time is spent. The actual number of days testing is bad, especially since many of the tests have no time limits, and running into weeks of make-up testing compelled by the pressure to be sure schools aren't playing games and every single student is tested.
LAUSD is one of the "Great City Schools" that participated in the survey.
I've shared this before, but a picture is worth a thousand...
Or, to put it another way:
For California's user-friendlier version redesigned to cloak the endless testing in endless jargon, you can go here. And once again Florida shows us that it can always get worse.
But that's just the actual testing, the most visible part of the iceberg. Ninety percent is underneath the surface, sucking the life and time out of every week in the semester. Here's a brief look at the submerged portion of the iceberg in my last couple of years in the classroom.
In ninth grade we were not required to give the mandated Common Core exam, or "SBAC" (they save that for eleventh grade), but we did give--in addition to the practice PSAT (that's right, a practice test for the practice test)--an additional five periodic assessments, "encouraged" by the district and therefore mandated by our school, assessments designed to raise their scores on the SBAC, a test they'd be taking two years later.
Five mandated tests. And after each one our school would devote an entire PD day to analyzing the scores, and each teacher would need to prepare a presentation explaining their performance. I'd like to say their students' performance, but it's never really framed that way. So that's two weeks before the assessment prepping and sweating, one day for the test (plus make-ups), a week of preparing your explanation, and a half-day of humiliation. More on that later.
Four weeks of teaching, two weeks of test prep, a week of analysis. A day of humiliation. Rinse. Repeat. Where does all the time go?
3. The tests are invalid and misleading.
Nothing drove me crazier than being forced to hack up our curriculum and cut out great units that students loved. Each year new ninth graders would come in with questions based on what they had heard from older sisters or brothers or friends. "Are we going to do the debate? Are we going to do poetry?"
Because of the need to accommodate growing testing expectations, more and more often the answer was "No. I'm sorry." And for what? As I've written many times (here and here, for example), the score data produced by these Big Standardized Tests is bullshit.
In other words, the test scores do not mean what they say they mean. Why? As UCLA professor W. James Popham wrote all the way back in 1999, "Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon."
In their "Standardized Tests Do Not Effectively Measure Student Achievement" (rpt from Ch. 3 of The Myths of Standardized Tests), Phillip Harris, Joan Harris, and Bruce M. Smith write that
Contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement. They fail to measure such important attributes as creativity and critical thinking skills. Studies indicate that standardized tests reward superficial thinking and may discourage more analytical thinking. Additionally, because of the small sample of knowledge that is tested, standardized tests provide a very incomplete picture of student achievement.
Testing is a sorting technique that tracks poverty and propels a "failing schools" narrative. The data are both invalid and unreliable and, at best, measure the degree to which a student reproduces a set of favored knowledge within prescribed terms of expression, in a single-session time period.
As any teacher (and anyone else who cares to know) can tell you, a test only represents a sample of what a teacher wants the student to know and be able to do. Give a student a test on the same information on Monday and again on Friday and the scores might go up or they might go down depending on any number of variables: sleep, hunger, the temperature, who's been fighting at home, and whether the student studied the selected information.
To focus so intensely on the Big Standardized Test is distracting and dishonest. The time and attention we devote to testing signifies that testing is the most important thing we do in school and that students' scores are meaningful measures of their achievement. It's worse than worthless. It's destructive.
4. The testing and the scores it produces are weaponized against teachers, schools, and the students themselves.
Schools.
Test scores are fed into the sorting bin and then published without context, magnifying their importance and giving observers the impression that the scores are reliable indicators of the quality of their schools. Schools are ranked and subject to public shaming as the media beat the "failing schools" drum. Malinformed, lucky parents gloat over the misimpression that the scores make their school the best. Malinformed sometimes angry parents shake their heads and spring into action looking for a new situation for their kids.
Until the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the law of the land was No Child Left Behind which allowed for schools that failed to meet their "adequate yearly progress" to be sanctioned. Edweek broke it down this way:
1. A school that misses AYP two years in a row has to allow students to transfer to a better-performing public school in the same district.
2. If a school misses AYP for three years in a row, it must offer free tutoring.
3. Schools that continue to miss achievement targets could face state intervention. States can choose to shut these schools down, turn them into charter schools, take them over, or use another, significant turnaround strategy.
Number one is a corker. It theoretically lets students jump to another school, but in L.A. a lot of those seats were all booked up. Never fear, there's a charter opening just across the street.
Number two is interesting, because every school I ever worked in offered tutoring, and I can't even fathom what the alternative to "free" would be.
That last one we used to call the death penalty. Reconstitution is firing everybody and replacing the entire staff--occasionally permitting some to re-apply for their jobs. That's one of those other "significant turnaround strategies."
(For more fun reading, here's a requirements and sanctions comparison of NCLB and RTTT.)
Now ESSA is the latest wrinkle and it looks like it broadens the standard definition of "high-quality education" and pays more attention to equity and fairness. It also looks to shift a lot of the headaches--including the punitive stuff--to states. More than likely they'll oblige. Stay tuned.
Teachers.
We are talking about The War On Teachers, after all. Test scores have been used extensively in teacher evaluations and as an incentive (merit pay). Beyond that, testing and test scores can result in everything from private "talks" in the principal's office to public PD humiliation.
Humiliation, you say? Remember those five periodic practice tests from earlier? The ones that carved fifteen weeks (plus) out of every school year? The ones that were supposed to raise actual test scores two years later? This is about that, from March 2022:
And so, after each test we would look at how dismal our scores were and compare them to the previous test to see if they went up or down. In a PD about *data* we would assemble in the elementary cafeteria and show each other our dismal scores (our students’ scores) and make up a story about why our scores might have gone down or up, and we’d make posters and cut out student names and put up the posters around the cafeteria and go one-by-one around the room and tell our stories and answer for our sins. That is, those of us in the math and English departments. All others adjourn to your rooms to work on teaching stuff.
The tests were all different and tested different standards and skills. We were told we could not test the same things twice to see if we had made progress. We compared scores from different kinds of tests and had to pretend that the improvement or decline from one test to the next meant something. “Wow, those kids really got it this time.” “Oh (downward inflection), that’s disappointing. What did you do differently?” “I taught different stuff!” And we did this for years.
I tried several times during the early days of this catastrophe to point out that we were not actually measuring progress or the lack of it. “It’s apples to orangutans!” “Five answers to five questions is not a valid measure of proficiency!” “Who chose four correct answers as the benchmark for proficient? And why?” “Skills? Standards? I looked at the data and my student scores precisely tracked their reading levels. Aren’t we really just assessing their reading?” I was... unheard.
Our analysis didn't mean anything because the scores didn't mean anything. Nevertheless, every five to eight weeks we engaged in this round-robin flagellation and excuse-fest, and we nodded and made posters, all the while knowing it was nonsense and getting sicker and sicker because there was so much more we could have been doing for our students. Humiliating.
The public shaming over test scores is disgraceful. The use of evaluation methods based on test scores, such as "value-added measurement," is, in the words of Dr. Au, "Neither Fair Nor Accurate."
Douglas F. Warring, in his 2015 article "Teacher Evaluations: Use or Misuse?" in the Universal Journal of Educational Research sketches out the requirements for a more accurate system, offering that "to be fair and to provide trustworthy estimates of teacher effectiveness, value-added measures require complicated formulas that take into account as many influences on student achievement as possible."
One of the things worse than VAM evaluations that aren't honest is merit pay that is. Or may be. Here Lam D. Pham, Tuan D. Nguyen, and Matthew G. Springer from Vanderbilt University show that bribing teachers for higher test scores that, again, are not meaningful ... works. Sometimes. "In some contexts."
Evaluating teachers based on test scores doesn't improve teaching. It doesn't produce achievement. It doesn't raise test scores unless that's all you want, and you're okay with the curriculum getting further squashed, and you've got a bunch of extra cash.
It. Doesn't. Work. And everybody knows it. More humiliation.
Students.
Students are punished in ways gross and subtle. A study by David Figlio published in 2006 in the Journal of Public Economics found that from 1996 to 2000, Florida schools found an "incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures." In an article published in the University of Florida News, Figlio described it this way:
Introduction of high-stakes testing to improve school accountability has apparently led these schools to disproportionately punish low-performing students during the testing period to try to ‘game the system.’
Although Florida has changed "accountability rules" to prevent this abuse, other penalties remain. Florida uses test scores for retention/promotion decisions, which can be discriminatory and closely associated with dropout rates.
For students who fail to excel on practice exams there's extra homework focused solely on the tests.
Dr. Peter Gray writes in Psychology Today from earlier this year ("Standardized Testing and the Destruction of Education") that testing suppresses creativity and that "the more we test, the more we reduce students' interests."
In her 2016 paper for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Christina Simpson underscores the stress, either from direct threat of retention or implied consequences to their teachers and schools, that students are under.
Citing Dutro, E., & Selland, M. (2012), “I like to read, but I know I'm not good at it” published in Curriculum Inquiry, Simpson writes, "how students perform on high-stakes testing can affect their beliefs about their own competence and potential as learners."
Professor David C. Berliner, educational psychologist and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University, has this 2003 research report reviewing the negative impacts of the testing regime on student motivation, graduation rates, and learning. It makes so much sense that it's no wonder education bosses ignore it.
What we are doing to students is incredibly destructive. There was a moment, sometime during the pandemic, when it looked like we might break the cycle. We would sober up and realize what shits we had been. Alas, no. Our "industry demands" Education Secretary decided that somebody--perhaps (the testing) industry?--needed data during a worldwide health crisis. Turns out that glimmer of hope was nothing but a mirage. We have returned to our regularly scheduled programming and we can get back to torturing kids.
Just imagine being one of those students--one of the ones you know quite well because, you know, you teach them every day. And imagine that you have been taking tests for what seems like your entire school life and that these tests are calibrated to yield a certain number of “not proficient”s every year, and that for as long as you can remember you have been one of them.
If you are reading this right now and you’re thinking “well that’s one kid” or “a few kids--intervention!” you have not done your homework. We’re talking about fifty to seventy percent of our kids in California. And even though you are “not proficient,” you have been going through school and learning stuff and passing your classes and doing pretty well, but every time you think you know something the test gets harder and you are once again one of the “not proficient”s. And imagine you don’t even find that out until the next year when there’s nothing you can do about it.
It must really suck, right? And so after having been battered and beaten with a number two pencil for long enough, a lot of those kids get discouraged and give up. Not all of them, but certainly enough for us to ask, “What significant and actionable information are we collecting by putting kids and parents and teachers and schools and districts through all this every year and sometimes every month? Why are we even doing this?”
And this, for many of us, is the breaking point. It was for me. It was terrible being shamed for something that had been years in the making when I had only known these kids for a few months. It was scary being threatened and punished for something over which I had little control. It was frustrating and miserable losing whole regions of learning and instead devoting so much time to something that did not reflect the most important things we were doing together in the classroom.
But all that was nothing compared to what it does to kids.
As I watched my students struggle each year, or give up, or do well and think that meant something, I got more and more discouraged. No amount of evidence or activism could steer the ship away from the iceberg. We seem perpetually unable to examine the data and change course accordingly.
I couldn't in good conscience--and mine is only fair--be a part of it any longer. I felt it was abusive and damaging, perhaps deliberately so. I was not alone.
I know it is all part of the plan. I know that testing is another battlefield in the War On Teachers and on public schooling, and that if the Enemies of Public Schooling can degrade the teaching profession enough that nobody wants to do it, then the entire institution collapses.
On the off chance somebody is out there listening and actually wants teachers to stay, here are some ideas.
In the project to destroy public schools and replace them with a "free" marketplace of schools, no strategy has been more important, more effective, and more broadly supported--even by people who should have known better--than testing.
Here it is through the eyes of a student:
Standardized tests are ineffective and overly stressful for the students. Students may perform worse because of tests that are supposed to measure how well they are doing. Testing doesn’t even serve the purpose it is intended to. In the crusade to record student performance, standardized tests are driving grades and student morale into the ground. Schools need to focus more on mental health and less on testing!
If Charlie West understands it, we all should.
