Jessie Ramey, who writes the terrific blog Yinzercation, writes a cogent list of the 13 ways that high-stakes, standardized testing hurts children and ruins their education.
Here are six of the 13. Open the link to see the other seven:
So what are the “high-stakes” for students in high-stakes testing? Examples we’ve been hearing from parents and educators across Pennsylvania include:
Lost learning time: There’s less time for learning with testing and test prep (for example, Pittsburgh students now take 20-25, or more, high-stakes tests a year, with new tests this year in art and music).
Reduced content knowledge: Students are learning how to take high-stakes-tests, but cannot demonstrate subject mastery when tested in a different format. [Koretz, 2008]
Narrowed curriculum: With a focus on reading and math scores, students lose history, world languages, the arts, and other programs.
Shut out of programs: Stakes exclude students when test results count as extra weight in magnet lotteries or for entrance to gifted programs or advanced courses.
Diverted resources: Schools that perform poorly on high-stakes-tests are labeled “failures” and sometimes have resources taken away from them. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on testing in Pennsylvania are not available for classroom education.
School closures: Schools labeled as “failing” on the basis of test scores can be threatened with closure. These schools are usually in communities of color.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“…with new tests this year in art and music.”
That’s good, because everything that’s important about art and music can be measured by a test.
Sigh.
exactly
and the same applies to everything else worth doing. All of life is a test. All of life is competition. Just look at the 3-minute video now being featured on the Common Core website.
In fact, no one would ever undertake ANYTHING for the love of it, because they were intrigued/fascinated, because it was interesting. Fortunately, we have tests to whip people into shape, to make them into obedient bots.
“…with new tests this year in art and music.”
This is educational malpractice. Can’t everyone see this?? Why does Arne Duncan belittle “suburban white moms” and have absolutely nothing to say about such absurdity??
Ditto.
Dienne and Bob Shepherd and Emmy: y’all inspired a wee thought in my head.
Years ago [ok, not that many] at the HS in which I was a SpecEd TA, I still remember the boxes and boxes and boxes full of bubble-in standardized tests that periodically arrived. So they were “unpacked” [notice how I worked a most excellent piece of literary argot and edujargon in there?], the students took the tests, and then the now-completed tests were put back in box after box after box.
Hence, in the bad old days before Commoners Core and computerized adaptive testing, the opposite of teaching students how to think “outside the box”!
Nowadays, in the enlightened era of $1 billion iPads and such, you can no longer accuse those designing, producing, testing, and administering high-stakes standardized tests of teaching students to “think inside the box” because—
THERE ARE NO MORE BOXES!
It’s all bits and bytes now. So let the consumers sweepstakes and hunger games, er, high-level thinking and learning, commence!
Howja like my close reading of decontextualized factoids? I feel all CC tingly right about now…
😎
Oh, there are plenty of boxes, still…you haven’t given the NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test). There are 4 sub-tests: Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing. Two answer sheets/student, K-12. Speaking is administered 1:1 to each and every student; teachers cannot assess their own students. Students K-2 circle their responses in their test book, teachers bubble their answers, students 3-12 bubble in their own responses.
Then there are the ELA and Math assessments grades 3-8 with their beginning, middle, and end-of-year assessments along with the monthly, (weekly for students who are “approaching” or “below” grade level expectations.) And we, teachers, have to bring our binder of “evidence” to pre-Observation meetings to prove that we are “measuring” and “diagnosing”. No room for professional judgement anymore. As my principal says, “Show me the data and how you are using the data to shape your instruction.”
Oh, and wish you could have been in the computer lab with me on the 4 days in late September and again, in January when I proctored Kindergarten students taking the “iReady”, an on-line ELA and Math assessment. I wish I had a hidden camera with me to film the questions and the reactions of the children. Wish I’d had the guts to do that…so that this whole charade could finally be exposed.
If parents could see it, they would be storming the Capitol Building and calling for the heads of Obama, Duncan, Coleman, Rhee…all of the de-formists and their billionaire funders.
We always had a few kids who could not master bubbling: those rows and rows of circles would not stand still and let them fill them in. So, guess who got to bubble their answer sheets after each testing session. 🙂 I shudder to think what is going to happen to those kids as they try to figure out how to show their math work. Straight bubbling should be a little bit easier if they watch what they are doing… I always had to return tests to kids who had skipped questions on paper.
Over the course of a K-12 education, extrinsic reward and punishment systems rob children of the understanding that education is not something that is done to them but something that they do, not something that they undergo, but something that they undertake. With every extrinsic punishment and reward, we teach that learning is not an end in itself but something that has to be externally motivated. No wonder people learn to hate it. That’s what, primarily, we teach them.
Motivation 101:
But people are so conditioned to the extrinsic reward system that it’s almost impossible for many to imagine something different (though a LOT of teachers I know do). It would be easy enough for people, generally, to do imagine alternatives if they but thought for a moment about that which carries, for them, intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic rewards.
Kids come into school wanting to learn, built to learn. You can’t keep them from learning.
And then we teach them, with much, much of what we do, that learning is something so awful that people have to be subjected to threat and reward in order to get them to do it.
Kids learn this lesson all too well.
And so we fail to meet our prime directive, to create independent, self-motivated, lifelong learners.
Because we’re wrong from the start.
High stakes standardized testing is just the reduction to total absurdity of a more generally pernicious approach.
Imagine a school system that presents learning as it is, as joyous.
Imagine that.
We Homo ignorans are very, very susceptible to social microconditioning. Our approach to education continually, unrelentingly microconditions kids to think of education as something to which people are SUBJECTED.
Kids learn that without it’s being explicitly taught. The very organization and approach, the structure, teaches that.
“Ain’t it the truth!” cried the Cowardly Lion.
“Over the course of a K-12 education, extrinsic reward and punishment systems rob children of the understanding that education is not something that is done to them but something that they do, not something that they undergo, but something that they undertake.”
Exactly. But then, when you need millions of Wal-Mart workers accustomed to doing what they’re told, you certainly don’t want an educational system that allows for autonomy and initiative.
Exactly, that’s what the training system for the proles (the Common Core) is INTENDED TO DO. To create an obedient underclass.
I wonder how many babies would give up walking if someone always pushed them down?
While all of these considerations are worthy; the author neglects to mention the greatest benefit of such exams. Without standardized, high stakes testing, how could we determine a school’s ZIP Code?
LOL!!!
ROFLMAO!
🙂
Thank you, Bob Shepherd for posting that video on the surprising truth about what motivates us. I have been sharing it with ANYONE who dares to tell me that we still need standardized tests.
I meant, “Thanks for posting that video, AGAIN!” Please, keep posting it! Please, everyone watch it!
Thanks also for your blog where you so eloquently give voice to the issues surrounding the Common Core (A Brief Analysis of Two Common Core State Standards) among others. For every post I’ve read on this blog in which the blogger asks rhetorically, where is the outcry (my words), I say, “Follow Bob Shepherd’s blog, http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/.
Thank you, concerned mom!