The cost of standardized testing has increased by many multiples in the past decade. By the estimate in this article, our nation now spends $20-50 billion on testing and preparing for testing. Texas, for example, spends almost ten times as much on testing as it did a decade ago.
What has that money produced? Let’s see, a dramatic lowering of teacher morale; cheating on a scale previously unknown; narrowing of the curriculum. How valuable was the expenditure? What if the same amount of money was spent differently? What would it produce?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good point Diane. We certainly agree on that. The question is how would we spend the extra 20 billion. Class size reduction? Better curriculum? Longer school day?
Bigger profits for online charter corporations? Bigger salaries for charter executives?
I have lots of better ideas. See the video of my speech to AFT convention.
is this not the purpose?
exactly what we are experimenting with. what if instead it were spent on the city… city as classroom, city as school..
we’re hoping to experiment.. to just see… with 20mill.
When will the insanity end? I don’t see much change with either presidential candidate. We will be forced th vote for the lesser of two evils for education. Hoping that somehow our voices will be heard. The sad truth is that for now money is the only voice being heard in government. We must keep speaking, as loudly as we can. There is power in numbers. As Diane has said, we must educate those in power so they can understand the truth. We must also educate our fellow voters. We must use our power as voters to put the right people in power and to keep the conversation open with our elected officials. This is very difficult in our current environment. Do we have the courage to “rage against the machine”?
What has that $20 billion produced?
Well, destabilization of the public schools and (intentional) demoralization of teachers aside, it has produced even greater wealth and power for the publishers, testing companies, hardware and software vendors, out-of-the-woodwork and out-from-under-a-rock self proclaimed education experts and social entrepreneurs, and all sorts of attendant parasites.
It turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in education, after all.
Excellent point. We can start here in NYC with the salaries of Eva Moskowitz and Geoffrey Canada. Why the parents, who are endlessly baking cupcakes to raise money for their children’s schools that have been decimated by budget cuts, are not outraged, is beyond me.
Imagine if we spent $20 billion buying poor kids books to read. Or stocking school libraries. Or building in-school clinics to take care of medical and dental needs. Or to make school lunches healthy and appealing. Or to create safe, clean, and appealing playgrounds with working equipment.
I can even be selfish and imagine what it would be like to build my classroom library so I don’t have to spend hundreds of my own dollars so my kids can have plenty of books to read. Even my school buying the really good new science textbook series which we now share — only 3 sets per grade level were affordable, so 5-6 classes share 3 sets. I can even dream about stocking science labs so our kids can have hands-on experience with science experiments. Buying the new social studies texts too would be nice; as a primary grades teacher I haven’t had any social studies materials provided in the 15 years I’ve been teaching. They always go to the upper grades.
We could even be creative and think about hiring unemployed parents to maintain school grounds, clean the buildings, staff the cafeterias, work as translators and/or aides, etc. providing much-needed income to suffering families. I can think of many, many things that we could spend $20 billion on that would be a far better use than enriching testing companies.
I read “The Answer Sheet” proposal for allocating this $20 billion windfall and liked what I heard until the discussion turned to a national computer network for viewing the project based learning of all our students. What is this insatiable need to assess a final product to somehow demonstrate the sum total of a student’s learning? Hogwash! Sounds like an excellent way to strip the joy out of the exercise. I can imagine the rubrics designed to analyze these creations. Why do we assume that our humble attempts to assess student learning in the past were so bad? We are buying into the whole measurement mania that says any genuine appraisal of learning must be quantifiable in a standardized fashion. Poppycock! I have yet to see a standard student.
My list would be too long to print and take too long to key in. I do agree with what has been suggested and then some.
Reblogged this on Abelardo Garcia Jr's Blog and commented:
My fellow teachers and readers! Pay close attention to the numbers!! Just imagine if all that 20 billion dollars was spent on MANY things that we actually NEED in our schools, to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes, to equip labs…we need to speak out before it is too late.
Just look at the tests! The “Pineapple Question?” Math questions that have NO correct answer or more than one correct answer? “Standardized,” “valid,” “reliable?” Please read Todd Farley’s 2009 book Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. Aside from administering these tests–which my colleagues and I time and again found unbelievably flawed–this book cemented my belief that these tests are…nothing but a waste of paper and time.
SHAME on the Obama Administration (especially Arne Duncan) for continuing to foist
this travesty upon American children.
SHAME on state governors and state superintendents who are destroying their children.