Steven Singer writes here about a dumb policy that is now commonplace thinking among both Ivy League corporate reformers and redneck legislators: If you make the tests harder, they reason, students will get higher test scores.
No, no, no, and no.
Singer says his students are weary of the endless testing. And it is getting worse because the tests will be even harder to pass in Pennsylvania.
He writes:
In the last two years, Pennsylvania has modified its mandatory assessments until it’s almost impossible for my students to pass.
Bureaucrats call it “raising standards,” but it’s really just making the unlikely almost unthinkable.
Impoverished students have traditionally had a harder time scoring as well as their wealthier peers. But the policy response has been to make things MORE difficult. How does that help?
Consider this: If a malnourished runner couldn’t finish the 50 yard dash, forcing him to run 100 yards isn’t raising standards. It’s piling on.
Oh. Both your arms are broken? Here. Bench press 300 lbs.
Both your feet were chopped off in an accident? Go climb Mt. Everest.
That’s what’s happening in the Keystone State and across the country. We’re adding extra layers of complexity to each assessment without regard to whether they’re developmentally appropriate or even necessary and fair to gauge individual skills.
Where Common Core State Standards have been adopted (and Pennsylvania has its own version called PA Core), annual tests have become irrationally difficult. That’s why last year’s state tests – which were the first completely aligned to PA Core – saw a steep drop off in passing scores. Students flunked it in droves.
Where the previous tests were bad, the new ones are beyond inappropriate.
Yes, across the country, the tests have been written and designed to fail most students. “Reformers” cheer the increased “rigor.” Do they care that most students are failing the tests? Why do they think that the score on a standardized test is a measure of good education? More likely, the pursuit of high test scores via multiple-choice tests undermines good education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My kid took the national French exam yesterday (a run-up to the AP exam). He said that nobody has ever had a perfect score. He asked, “shouldn’t some smart native speaker be able to score perfectly on it, the way you can get a perfect score on the SAT?” He has a point: if an exam tests mastery, then shouldn’t mastery be possible?
Obviously, the national French exam isn’t what we’re all concerned about, but any high school junior who’s come up through the madness of state testing and survived the SATs, the NY regents, and now APs has the right to an opinion. And I agree with him: What’s the point of a test that cannot reveal that a student has mastered a subject?
One can study for a French exam. One cannot study for the SBAC and PARCC ELA exams. A really hard French exam could conceivably induce our schools to bone up on teaching French, leading kids at least to get better at French. But it doesn’t work this way with the SBAC and PARCC ELA exams. You don’t get better at them by studying English, because they don’t test English knowledge. They test…who really knows? A messy mix of short-term memory power, doggedness, awareness of a few fetishized concepts (e.g. that topic sentences demand supporting evidence), general knowledge… More than anything they test familiarity with the test themselves. The only known method of preparation is to do practice test questions. So by preparing for these tests, kids only get better at test prep –they don’t end up with any valuable by-products like, for example, French or chemistry knowledge. While standardized testing may never be a good idea, it is especially perverse when the tests themselves are gobbledygook. Not all standardized tests are equally bad. I would argue that the SBAC/PARCC are about as bad as they can get as they are incoherent and lead to sterile test prep. It is a scandal that these gobbledygook tests are now the national DNA for our schools’ curricula.
Years ago, a student of mine showed me a prep packet for an entrance exam in ELA that he needed to take for an elite Japanese/American boarding school. He had been in the U.S. for close to four years by this time and wanted to stay in the U.S. when his parents returned to Japan. Top performance at this school would guarantee him admission to a top university in Japan. The packet was riddled by mistakes, obviously written by someone whose native language was not English. I remember the look we shared in recognition of the poor quality of this material. Just a glance at his academic record and perhaps a sample of his work would have shown them if he could participate in a high school program that was delivered in both Japanese and English. I must admit that we did wonder if they would recognize when his answers were correct and what kind of ELA instruction he would receive at this highly regarded school.
Plus, when students parctice PARCC “CCRAP”, there no answers ever given. Students don’t ever know if they are getting the right answer. Probably again, because Pearson would not want any student to actually feel successful!
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The pursuit of high test scores undermines a good education.
Then there is the fact that the children of the monsters, movers and shakers in the for-profit, at any cost movement, to destroy community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit public education in the U.S. send their own children to schools that are not using these tests but offer a tradition good education instead with small class sizes and highly qualified teachers who are not required to use scripted lessons and do not fear being ranked and fired based on the test scores of students they might never have taught.
This practice continues to fail our students ..
There are subjects where the whole concept of mastery should be put into the dumper because there is no clear paradigm for mastery relevant to achievement, especially for teens.
So, for example, if the paradigm for mastery in the visual arts is an artist from the height of the Renaissance, or Picasso, or Elizabeth Catlett, or Frank Geary, or Maya Lin then some combination of talent and education, and training may be harbingers of future achievements.
But those artists, and their biographies, are in no way suitable as indicators of a proper education for every student, and least of all with the decline of European academies and systems of patronage in the arts that supported them. I suspect I am not alone in thinking of the very word “academic” as if invariably positive is a real problem, not just in relation to art.
This not to say that experienced teachers of art are incapable of making judgments about the work of students, whether their are work is produced in or out school, but that there is no single definitive test for mastery.in creating/producing art..Indeed the very concept of what counts as art is contested. The era of finding a consensus is long gone.
There are tests of knowledge and relatively sophisticated thinking about histories of art, and art criticism, but ” mastery” is still a ridiculous expectation for all students, and made worse by adding the idea of grade-level expectations.
Ah yes, rigor: the intended rigor mortis of public education.
Absolutely true about rigor, and then there is grit that’s intended to turn community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, professional public education to dust.
“a dumb policy that is now commonplace thinking among both crew-neck Ivy League corporate reformers and redneck legislators”
Fixed.
“Crewnecks and Rednecks”
The crewnecks and rednecks
Are running “reform”
And car-wrecks and train-wrecks
Are simply the norm
Yep, to keep the crony capitalist, for-profit economy rolling for the oligarchs, the high paid CEOs and mega corporations, there are more than 36 thousand deaths from vehicle accidents annually and an addition 2,.35 million are injured or disabled. Over 1,600 of those deaths are children who soon will be dug up and forced to take a high stakes standardized test and when they score a zero, the teachers they had the year they died, will be ranked and fired.
In a crony capitalist country, only the 1% at the top count as humans. The other 99% are products that are only there to increase profits and pay for the 1%.
As for the railroads, in 2014 alone, to keep the crony capitalist commerce moving, there were almost 2,000 rail accidents, and that’s down from more than 3,000 in 2005. Since most of the trains that had accidents carried few humans, there were few rail-related fatalities. 94% of the rail deaths were linked to trespassing and/or a vehicle on the tracks, where they shouldn’t have been waiting, when the train arrived at the collision location.
But those rail accidents cut into profits so:
https://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L17342
One way to make a test more rigorous, but keep it in a multiple-choice format, is by increasing the vocabulary level. Open-ended tests are more difficult to grade and by extension more costly. Not to mention more ambiguous. So, we have tests for 8th graders with high school and college level vocabulary. I’m talking social studies here.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, is this isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.
And yes, I’ve been grading short-answer history tests on our spring break here in Texas. I know which students have been studying and understand the material. And who doesn’t.
If we create harder tests that do not yield a bell shaped curve or include developmentally inappropriate material, the test designers are failing the students by creating an unfair test. A legitimate test should not fail two thirds of the students due to an arbitrary cut score. Failing more students will not raise standards. It serves only to feed the narrative of a politicized agenda.
A hearty “thank you” to all those that have commented above.
Two points.
1), The psychometricians that design and produce high-stakes standardized tests give the clients of the companies for which they work what they want and pay for. The test-makers are very good at what they do. That is why an approx. 70% fail rate on the NYS tests was no surprise to those that made and bought them. For the rest of us: sucker punched.
2), Rheephormsters are infamous for subjecting OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN to the worst management practice summed up in the old saying: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Said rheephorm strictures also include such proven failures as “fire your way to success” and “you measure what you treasure aka you treasure that which can be measured.” For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, go to the websites of Lakeside School and U of Chicago Lab Schools and Phillip Exeter and Spence School and the like.
😎
Deeper problems. The expectations for “mastery” of x, y, z by a certain grade level and the assumption that only the content/skills taught by the teacher are active in what the student has learned and can muster for the test.
And, problematically attached to the assumption that “harder” tests will make for a more rigorous classroom, is the fact that as test-score reforms have invaded low-income buildings (bringing along their “harder” tests) each year teachers are allowed less and less time to actually teach.
First, testing is only 2nd class assessment and has minimal value when compared to “whole child” assessment.
Second, “raising the bar” is great rhetoric but is horrible because the bar is only in one place and children are not. What happens when the child reaching for the bottom rung sees the bar raised just as he or she arrives? They fall off, give up and the pipeline to prison continues.
When will we ever learn?