Peter Greene here explains what most teachers know about standardized testing. It is a monumental waste of time and money. It doesn’t reflect what students were taught or learned.
He writes:
“Standardized testing is completely inauthentic assessment, and students know that. The young ones may blame themselves, but students of all ages see that there is no connection between the testing and their education, their lives, anything or anyone at all in their real existence. Standardized test are like driving down a highway on vacation where every five miles you have to stop, get out of the car, and make three basketball shot attempts from the free throw line– annoying, intrusive, and completely unrelated to the journey you’re on. If someone stands at the free throw line and threatens you with a beating if you miss, it still won’t make you conclude that the requirement is not stupid and pointless.
“And so the foundation of all this data generation, all this evaluation, all this summative formative bibbitive bobbitive boobosity, is a student performing an action under duress that she sees as stupid and pointless and disconnected from anything real in life. What are the odds that this task under these conditions truly measures anything at all? And on that tissue-thin foundation, we build a whole structure of planning students’s futures, sculpting instruction, evaluating teachers. There is nothing anywhere that comes close in sheer hubritic stupidity.”
The only point he overlooks is that standardized testing mirrors socioeconomic status and distributes benefits and sanctions along the SES curve.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, too many kids think it is important and that it says something about them. Why else would big, important adults put them through this exercise?
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Or that it shows if they are “college and career ready,” as the propaganda says it will indicate. Our ten year old brought attention to that one for us. He listens. He was told school would make him college and career ready in the mission statement; therefore, logic led him to conclude that these tests must be what measure those goals
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Love this!!! Perfectly well said by someone who knows.
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Great blog – creatively expressed!
Old school or at least tolerable Standardized Testing:
Educator designed, educator vetted
Test once every 3 or 4 years to assess progress of a cohort of students
Test at transition years to get picture of cohort entering new school or grade cluster (test in grades 5, 8, and 10 or in grades 4, 8, and 10)
A means of assessing curriculum strengths and gaps
A means of seeing how an entire school works toward achievement
Benchmark schools across states (the “at grade level” in Mississippi vs. Massachusetts)
New age millennial, CEO’s, politician, quick fixers Standardized Testing:
Gates and CCSSOs designed, economist vetted
Test every grade, every subject (NCLB/RTTT)
One time, months old data use to make far too many decisions about students
Used to put dreaded points, scores, and labels on teachers
High-stakes evaluation based on high-stakes tests = narrowed curriculum
Al Capone version of paying for protection: Want to pass our tests? Buy our books and materials?
Fire, Aim, Ready!
I may be in the minority – periodic (every few years) testing to benchmark kids/schools over time and to cite curriculum strengths and gaps has some benefit. If we were in charge of billions of state or federal (uggh) dollars, in addition to spending it on professional development, we’d want to know things were working and as means to use in academic research. But the current system on steroids is out of control.
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Well stated. In addition to testing at transition years, we need only test a sample of students rather than each and every one.
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Jere and Scott,
Even those periodic standardized tests would/will suffer the same epistemological and ontological errors that render the educational standards and accompanying tests and results completely invalid. Read and understand what Noel Wilson has proven and that has never been rebutted/refuted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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Tests measure what is on the test. Nothing more. The problem comes in when we introduce a kind of mysticism using the tests as tea leaves into a student’s future. The fact we shroud the results in poorly applied math and psychobabble doesn’t put clothes on the Emperor. Interesting point about the tests being a type of social engineering to suppress free though and individual liberties.
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It is interesting to note that boys do consistently better on standardized tests than on teacher assigned grades.
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As Wilson states “Test measure what the person who pays for the tests says it measures”.
And in reality it doesn’t measure anything as the teaching and learning process is completely not amenable to being measured. One may attach numbers to the score, numerizing results but that still doesn’t mean “anything” has been measured, even though probably 99% of everybody believes that they do. It’s a very strong cultural meme-almost impervious to logical rational thinking, much as a belief in a particular god.
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Speaking of a monumental waste of time and money, tomorrow begins our Pennsylvania test (PSSA) period for the next two weeks. For me, a 7th grade social studies teacher with home room responsibilities, it means that for the next two weeks I am essentially a test proctor with multiple test security concerns which have been hammered into us the past several months in online and faculty meeting training sessions. The next six mornings will be devoted to picking up the tests from the security center, assuring they are kept secure before and after the test, distributing No. 2 pencils and snacks, reading the test instruction scripts, and monitoring the poor test takers for periods that run to almost an hour and a half. Teaching is then supposed to commence during shortened periods and with kids who are now drained. We have been instructed in our school that we cannot assign homework during the test days. All this on top of the fact that we have had 6 snow days this winter and 5 late arrivals because of snow which have negatively impacted teaching time. Oh well. We do what we have to do and take care of the kids the best we can.
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I appreciate Mr. Greene’s frustration. I believe your last sentence, regarding the points Mr. Greene overlooks, is very important, in addition to the misguided practice of tests being used for teacher evaluations. It would have been helpful, however, if Mr. Greene would have mentioned which tests in particular he was referring to, so that we knew in what respects they are unrelated to real life.
I agree that we are not using tests in a constructive way, but there are a couple issues that seem to get lost in the larger discussion: Standards and standardized tests are two different concepts. Test standardization is a statistical method to convert raw scores into normalized scores. For example, the Apgar Test is a standardized test for newborns. It helped me as a parent understand where my baby boy compared to other newborns. It simply provided a snapshot of my baby’s status on five measures, not a bad thing in and of itself. But as Mr. Greene points out indirectly, we then have to conduct tests to determine the reliability and validity of standardized tests.
Standards, on the other hand, are actual benchmarks that an organization determines its practitioners must meet, like the American Medical Association and its doctors. Again, not a bad thing.
Please don’t get me wrong. I do not agree with the current use of educational standardized tests in the K-12 setting. Like any other tool, they are useful for only certain things. The bigger issue is that governing bodies are misusing and overusing this particular tool. If we want to get a snapshot of where are students and schools are in relation to each other, we certainly don’t have to test each and every student several times a year. We shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer money and teachers’ and students’ time and energy.
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Scott,
An Apgar score is a completely different assessment than any academic standardized test. The newborn itself does not complete the assessment for one thing. See above to learn why all these educational standards and standardized test/results are completely invalid.
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Duane, noted, thank you. I was simply attempting to illustrate the distinction between, and the definitions of, standards and standardized tests, which often get intermingled.
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Any thoughts about why boys score better on standardized exams than their grades suggest they should? See http://ftp.iza.org/dp5973.pdf
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And, TE, that’s a good argument for having such tests be OPTIONAL, one of many ways in which students can CHOOSE, if they and their advisors so decide, to take in order to demonstrate their abilities.
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Would it be a good idea to have teacher assigned grades be optional as well?
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If it were up to me, TE, as I have mentioned before, grades for classes would be replaced by very concrete, very specific certificates of achievement that mean things like
I can write a simple HTML 5.0 page using style sheets
I have read and can describe the works and beliefs of four major figures from the American Transcendentalist Movement
And so, yes, I believe that grades should be replaced by various, alternative means of demonstrating achievement in order to receive said certifications, a long list of which would constitute the student’s school record. And, in a system such as what I envision, kids would graduate with very different sets of certificates, reflecting the differing paths that they chose to take, under the guidance of their IEP committees, through the system. Of course, every kid would have an IEP.
The A, B, C, D, F business is crude and could definitely be improved upon via a system that specified accomplishment a lot more concretely. However, it’s more accurate than the standardized testing is.
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I would oppose, of course, creation of mandated, top-down requirements for these certifications. I would support, instead, having competing envisionings of them put forward by lots and lots of competing vendors on an ongoing basis.
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I would want to see options for demonstrating the competency necessary to receive any given certification, of course. But to the extent possible, the competency should be demonstrated via performance–doing something, making something, creating something, demonstrating something.
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In other words, I think an education for the 21st century should go in PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION from the direction that standardized testing is taking us in–that it should be a diverse, as multi-tracked, and as STUDENT-DIRECTED as possible, reflecting the following PRIME DIRECTIVE: To produce self-determined, independent, intrinsically motivated learners who can take initiative, chart their own course (with help), and get something accomplished that is unique.
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The idea that schools should exist to fill kids up with a set of skills and knowledge as though they were buckets is really, really backward. The kids in our schools today are going to see more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history to this point. They had better be self-motivated, independent, flexible, creative thinkers and learners. We don’t create such people via extrinsic punishment and reward systems.
But, the oligarchy already knows that. That’s why the schools that THEIR KIDS attend don’t work that way.
The Common Core is meant to be prole training.
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Rubrik, Rigor…. “ed reformy” vocabulary… NOW FOR THE REAL STUFF…bibbitive, bobbitive, boobosity!
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“bibbitive bobbity boobosity” is about the best description I’ve ever heard of today’s standardized tests. As mentioned in the original post for Pennsylvania, Maryland also used to assemble teachers from the state at a hotel or huge scoring facility for a company that was NOT Pearson, and read over student project-based assessments. It was called the MSPAP test, and they featured multidisciplinary tasks, no bubble questions, and a schedule of once every three years for kids.
If the tests are “reliable,” as everyone seems to claim they are (I doubt that, but this is not MY argument), it would seem there’s no reason whatsoever to test kids every single year. Not every single kid, anyway. If we have to test so many kids so many times, there can be no way teachers in any state have enough time outside the classroom to read the projects, evaluate them, and provide useful feedback.
Finally, if kids get nothing out of the tests (and we all should, by now, agree they don’t), this starts to erode what I think of as “efficiency.” In engineering terms, efficiency is the amount of energy you get out of an engine divided by the amount of energy you put it. For the PARCC tests, for example, we’re going to put in about $30 a kid, plus lots of schedule manipulation in our schools, purchasing of computer equipment, etc. That’s the denominator. The numerator, in whatever units we measure it, is zero, as far as I can tell. If kids don’t get anything out of the tests, the efficiency is zero.
I only bring up efficiency because it directly relates to this post in that I agree with Peter Greene that there is not a shred of output students get from these standardized tests today. Kids, teachers, and state data collectors alike used to get something out of tests, when the tests were better, but that is not how the new tests are looking at this point.
As a side note, the state constitutions of Maryland and Illinois (the only two I checked) entitle citizens of those states to a system of “efficient” public schools that are free. How low can we take the efficiency calculation before it runs afoul of our constitutions?
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“If the tests are “reliable,” as everyone seems to claim they are. . . ”
They are not reliable as proven by Noel Wilson. Read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted takedown of educational standards and standardized testing referenced above.
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Professor Yong Zhao states that China has learned its lesson and is ending the practices we are implementing now. He says that constant testing, scoring, and ranking has resulted in Chinese students with high test scores on PISA tests but no confidence in their abilities. China wants to be able to innovate like the U.S. Testing does not make students college and career ready. And it definitely does not produce creative scientific thinkers who know how to fail, fail, fail and try again. How much time will we have to waste before we can legislatively throw the CC out?
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And how many more millions of children will be suffer permanent psychological damage before this gets fixed?
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I do not think all Standardized testing is a waste of time, just the punitive nature of how Standardized testing is used. I know that when my students in a Title I school took the AP English Language and Composition it was transformative. Students worked and excelled in ways they had not previously. Students pushed themselves to understand “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural”, “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, and “In Cold Blood”. Students pushed themselves to write research papers with eight sources and students thanked me for preparing them for college. Of course, the passing rate was not held against me and only nine out of the sixteen who even sat for the test passed. But taking the class and the Standardized test was valuable. They live in mainstream society and they want to succeed.
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“I do not think all Standardized testing is a waste of time. . .”
Think again after reading Noel Wilson’s complete destruction of the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing referenced above.
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Duane Swacker: unexpected support for your stance, in this case dealing with the latest EduCraze, Commoners Core.
An unimpeachable witness for those who think that high-stakes standardized testing measures little or nothing of value, is inherently imprecise, and is used for purposes for which it is ill-suited and/or completely unsuited.
To whom do I refer? None other than Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, literally the definition of an “education reform” insider.
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
But what, oh what, did they do in days of olde when knights were bold and VAM based on standardized tests wasn’t invented?
“In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.” [Stephen Leacock]
😎
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Opportunity costs. We have to ask what are we not doing due to testing.
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It’s not just the wasted time and money that could be spent doing better things for our children. It is the effect it has on the students themselves. If these tests make them feel stupid….or lose all confidence….what have we done?
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It’s not a matter of “if”, Dawn. What you state is a fact and a horrendous, inexcusable, unethical educational malpractice that harms children.
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Standardized tests and our primitive misapplication of psychometrics will someday be viewed as we now look at some of the ridiculous attempts at science from the dark ages.
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They already are viewed that way by some of us. Too bad I don’t have a couple of extra billion to throw around to get the message out.
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Strong language in your title for this post, Diane!
But altogether appropriate, for the testing obsession is sucking time for real learning, energy, financial resources, and, importantly, JOY from the K-12 education. CC$$ is the undead Son of NCLB. Put a stake in it.
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This is just the statistical version of Phrenology, it just as inaccurate, and we will remember it with shame I hope.
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Hey, at least measuring heads has a little creative fun to it. 🙂
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
This is great.
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Less testing? How will the testing executives pay for their vacation houses and pay for their children’s’ private school tuition. What about the for-profit education industry? What would they have to do to survive?
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I am student who can tell you firsthand, these tests take away so much class time. I have tried to tell my teachers what I think, but it’s always been the same scene. The fact is, we are given a special template drilled into our heads, and come testing day all we have to do is fill in the blanks. The teachers claim “not everyone can do this” but then it is more a measure of memory, because you don’t have to comprehend what you’re reading to get partial credit. Our teachers tell us not to stress, but how can we not? If you’re going to spend 6 months on something, damnit, it better be important or you’re wasting my time.
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