There has been animated conversation on the blog about whether school tests are benign because they are similar to medical tests. They are in fact very dissimilar. The differences between standardized tests and medical tests are many.
One, the medical tests do not have multiple-choice answers. Doctors understand that the same results mean different things for different patients, depending on their age, weight, medical history, and other factors.
Two, your doctor (a human being) interprets the test results, relying on her/his experience and wisdom.
Three, in most cases, you get the test results within a few days, not months later.
Four, by the time the results of the standardized tests are reported, the student has a different teacher. The teacher is not allowed to review the questions to see what the student got wrong. Unlike the medical tests, which pinpoints specific problems, the standardized tests provide no diagnostic information. They are worthless to teachers and students.
Five, the purpose of the medical tests is to find a treatment to make you feel better; the purpose of the standardized education test is to rank you against other students, to grade your teacher, and to evaluate your school. Imagine a medical test that told you not how to get better, but how you compare to patients in other states, and whether your doctor should be fired and his practice should be closed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Also, if my blood pressure is too high, they don’t fire the doctor.
Exactly right, med tests and standardized tests are not comparable.
I remember posting a comment on this blog a few weeks ago about how the doctor doesn’t get judge by the the overall health of the patient just on the condition he or she treats him for. Also, the patient can take the advise of the doctor or not.
Yes, more similar to the written driver’s test.
FYI though, many doctors are being judged based on outcomes of their chronically ill patients. Not the numbers of them, but how many ER visits, etc., which would be an indication of poor management. This is somewhat like the growth measures of students. The ultimate control is the patient’s, but there are doctors who do well and some who do poorly at educating their patients on the importance of managing their disease, lifestyle changes, etc. Insurance companies (the payers) would prefer to have doctors who keep their chronically ill patients out of the ER.
Outcome based medicine is becoming much more common and physicians are getting as frustrated as teachers because pay is involved. Patients do not always follow doctor’s orders and consequently some find themselves readmitted. There are penalties for certain re-admissions and I believe the list is growing. There are more re-admissions in high poverty areas than in the better off suburbs….gee….who’d a guessed? There are some patients who are obstinate a it is the hospital/physician who get the penalty. The end result is more professionals leaving because we live in a society where blaming someone is acceptable and where corporate reformers (education and healthcare) have healthier bottom lines by promoting this approach.
Professionals are leaving because there are too many MBAs making decisions that should be made by actual professionals.
I agree that a single standardized test can’t tell you much about a student, but cumulative grade level data can provide invaluable information about a school’s curriculum. Texas has strong standards and a state assessment 100% matched to these standards. Used effectively, this data provides schools a tool for improving their curriculum to promote student achievement and equity in education.
Only if you define “student achievement” as “better test scores”. Thank you, but no. Texas can keep their “strong standards” and their 100% matched tests.
The comparison is too absurd to be taken seriously — the sort of assertion that only a troll could make.
The only time I can remember the same battery of medical tests being administered indiscriminately to a mass of people at the same time was my draft physical in the late 60s.
Which ought to tell you something …
Turn your head and cough, dudes …
Diane ~ Have you seen the article on Politico re Pearson? Probably, and maybe you mentioned it in your blog, but it’s worth sharing “Pearson leave no profit unturned” or something close to that, quite worthwhile ~ it all adds up & is starting to gain momentum in the mainstream.
After giving the NY French Regents (which is no longer given, by the way), I would often go over the results of the tests with the students (the following year, of course). I had many students the following year. They gave all kinds of reasons for missing answers (mind you, two months later). Examples include not knowing a certain French word or phrase, feeling tired during the tests because they had another test before mine, the ventilation system was too loud, guessing, not knowing why they picked an answer, etc. This often led me to the conclusion that many factors in student performance were outside my control as a teacher. It’s even worse with standardized tests especially ones on a computer. Can you imagine herding all the students into the computer labs once again to correct their work and tell why they got the answers wrong? What good would it do anyway if the teacher knew from a chart that many students missed question 5? There could be a myriad of reasons as to why the student missed the question. Also, computerized tests are taking away the opportunity to annotate, to go back and look at a paper, to sit and think for a while. So, these standardized tests mean nothing and they are not “driving instruction.” I haven’t heard 1 teacher say that the results on these tests have made any difference at all in his/her teaching. If someone wants to refute this, please do. In the end, they are a way to make money for testing companies. That’s all.
Maybe there are a few similarities between good medical practice and effective instruction. In quality medicine, care decisions are based on multiple measures, not a single test, are frequently collaborative between patient and doctor, and are best made in collaboration among professionals, not alone. http://wpo.st/2w160
Unfortunately, our now resigned governor in Oregon bought into the idea that testing in schools was just like medicine. And, using his past as an emergency room doctor, was an enthusiast for the idea of CCSS, SBAC, and a whole host of other state regulatory efforts through the Oregon Department of Education.
And, sadly, he never woke up to the error in his fundamental, underlying concepts. It’s likely quite good for Oregon education that he’s gone. We just have to hope that Kate Brown (the new Governor) can see more clearly.
Some medical tests are benign but some are definitely not benign – biopsy tests in prostate cancer can have horrible side effects. In fact, population testing for prostate cancer via blood test is not recommended because so many false positives then face biopsy as the next step i.e. people without prostate cancer get subjected to an invasive test with potentially nasty side-effects.
(FYI: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet)
But this does actually bring in an important point – people analyse standardised tests as if the answer they provide is completely accurate for whatever they think they are measuring (which is often not what they are actually measuring anyway).
Whereas Doctors know that the results of a medical test throw up false positives and false negatives all the time.
Yes, Diane offers non educators a clear comparison to tests in medicine and the current wrong use of tests in education. Useful tests can identify schools and students that need intensive help to improve learning. Such tests do not need to be given more frequently than every three years in any school. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo correctly identified a severe problem in some New York schools when he identified 100,900 students in need of help,in failing schools. His solutions miss the mark. He proposed 50 percent of student gain scores be assigned to their teachers for their annual evaluation throughout the whole state when he already identified the critical problem is located in few schools such as the six schools he identified on Long Island. If New York and other states are to achieve better results among students, the schools and communities with high failure rates need expert intervention and the state should not default on these responsibilities any longer. Imposing large scale remedies and panaceas across a whole state for specific challenges in specific schools harms successful schools as well as those in need of extensive help. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo is wasting valuable resources attacking teachers in successful schools and failing to offer a solution to the schools he identifies need help. Think about Governor Andrew Cuomo and his fellow classmates who failed the New York State bar exam where the passing rate for New York Sate Law schools is 72 percent or even the State Certified Public Accounting exam where the passing rate is 50 percent. Should their professors be fired? Should the schools be closed because their students do not achieve an arbitrary pass rate on exams designed to produce a desired lower pass rate? Our children are taking exams at all grade levels that exceed the common core curriculum standards and the reading level assigned to their grade level. Why? So that political goals of individual politicians and their financiers can be achieved. It is time that all of us stand up and oppose the wrongful use of tests. We know PET scans, X-rays, mama grams and other tests will not cure a single illness. We know that excessive testing will not improve learning at struggling schools. We know that excessive testing will harm healthy schools just as excessive testing can harm healthy patients. It is time for parents to demand that their legislators represent the interests of their children and provide help for children in struggling schools and stop imposing on successful schools unnecessary expenditures for excessive testing that helps no one.
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Cuomo wouldn’t know a “failing school” [sic] if it bit him in the @$$. If he has ever identified an actual failing school (to the extent such a thing even exists), it would be entirely by chance in the way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. By identifying those 100,900 “failing” students in their “failing” schools, Cuomo did far more harm to them than any school ever did. A school with a high percentage of kids in poverty, kids with disabilities, kids learning English and/or other kids who don’t score well on tests is not a “failing school”. If Cuomo wants to know what’s failing, he can look in a mirror.
Medical tests can scientifically measure certain things in the body that are known to be indicative of disease. Standardized tests cannot measure intelligence. Who was more intelligent – Einstein or Bach? Ben Franklin or Maya Angelou? Emerson or Newton or Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Does it matter? Again, as Postman points out, our use of the computer is now altering our perception of what it means to be intelligent, “college and career ready,” etc. We think that if the computer gives us data that this data is automatically meaningful. We are, in many ways, trying to quantify, measure and make decisions on issues that can’t be quantified. It reminds me of Dead Poets Society when students are supposed to plot the greatness of a poem on a scale. I think this is, in part, what parents are reacting to in education. They see that their children are now being treated like just a test score and that the other aspects of education like socialization, teacher creativity & input, and the need for children to have a childhood are being threatened. It really is indicative of the struggle of the human against what Postman would call the Technopoly.
Can standardized tests measure mastery of subject matter? Who’s better at math — Einstein or me? Does it matter? I submit it does not!
YES. A blood test permits doctors to actually see real things, like viruses or white cells or whatever, which are *known* to indicate diseases, which cannot *game* the test, and which are not visible to the naked eye.
Academic multiple choice tests try to get students to choose the bubble which will reveal their “mastery” of abstract, subjective things like critical thinking. The tests only reveal how good students are at taking tests.
the fact is that you cannot test to find out what is in someone’s head. You can only ask someone to put on a performance that, most likely, will only be possible for someone to do if they know what they are talking about. And its not a multiple choice test.
Thank you for straightening that out. The billionaires must think we are ignorant not to know that there is NO parallel here.
This is interesting. I get the gist of the point made in this brief post, but I wonder if a closer examination might not illustrate the extent to which both medical and educational testing are similar because of their expropriation by neo-liberal policy. For instance, the note about a patient’s doctor interpreting test results is fairly outdated. Tests are far more frequently read by third parties and results with summaries are provided to GPs. Like the case with large-scale standardized test grading, the relationship between two individuals is outsourced to a distant, standardized, and often privatized stranger. There is also an ever-growing trend toward standardization in the reading of medical tests, particularly fueled by insurance standards and the broader ideological trend toward sameness (why, after all, would we expect the money managers to treat their endeavors in education in one manner and in health in another?). As public pushback grows stronger in reaction to these dehumanizing trends in education and health, we might do well to think about the neoliberal policies driving both, making allies of those in similar situations.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I see this exactly as you do! Prescriptive/diagnostic vs. standardization. Going the wrong direction! http://audreykfriel.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-prescription-is-not-standardization.html
Can someone explain why the NEAwants there to be a “Dashboard” to monitor progress of schools?
What? You have to have data for a dashboard.
You can’t really be against testing but be for data dashboards, can you?
Also, the tests are subsidiary to your behavior or condition, not the goal of your behavior or condition. You don’t live to take the tests; they reveal what needs to be revealed as a result of your behavior or condition.