Steven Singer notes that standardized testing season is upon us.
While he is at school administering useless standardized tests, his daughter will be home, inventing, playing, using her imagination.
“In school I have to proctor the federally mandated standardized tests. But I’ve opted my own daughter out. She doesn’t take them.
“So at home, I get to see all the imaginative projects she’s created in her class while the other kids had to trudge away at the exam.
“Daddy, daddy, look!” she squeals.
“And I’m bombarded by an entire Picasso blue period.
“Or “Daddy, will you staple these?”
“And I’m besieged by a series of her creative writing.
“My daughter is only in second grade and she loves standardized test time.
“It’s when she gets to engage in whatever self-directed study strikes her fancy.
“Back in kindergarten I missed the boat.
“Even as an educator, myself, I had no idea the district would be subjecting her to standardized tests at an age when she should be doing nothing more strenuous than learning how to share and stack blocks.
“But when I found out she had taken the GRADE Test, a Pearson assessment not mandated by the state but required by my home district in order the receive state grant funding, I hit the roof.
“I know the GRADE test. I’m forced to give a version of it to my own 8th grade students at a nearby district where I work. It stinks.
“Ask any classroom teacher and they’ll tell you how useless it is. Giving it is at best a waste of class time. At worst it demoralizes children and teaches them that the right answer is arbitrary – like trying to guess what the teacher is thinking….
“I have studied standardized testing. It was part of my training to become a teacher. And the evidence is in. The academic world knows all this stuff is bunk, but the huge corporations that profit off of these tests and the associated test-prep material have silenced them.
“I have a masters in my field. I’m a nationally board certified teacher. I have more than a decade of successful experience in the classroom. But I am not trusted enough to decide whether my students should take these tests.
“It’s not like we’re even asking the parents. We start from the assumption that children will take the tests, but if the parents complain about it, we’ll give in to their wishes.
“It’s insanity.
“We should start from the assumption the kids won’t take the test. If parents want their kids to be cogs in the corporate machine, they should have to opt IN.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Our Students, Their Moment.”
It rings so false, yet touches a chord.
Make it real. Stop focusing on measurement and truly meaningless “data”, or FAKE INFORMATION for phony documentation and fake education news and fake education research.
When people, kids and adults, are given a chance to truly buy in and better themselves, and they do this in earnest, it is both humbling and transcendent. What is happening with testing now is so far from this, it is beyond very sad. It heartbreaking. It is opportunity cost on an epic scale. It is a travesty. It is a clownish fallacy in corporatist action, clowns in business shoes.
We should start from the assumption the kids won’t take the test. If parents want their kids to be cogs in the corporate machine, they should have to opt IN.”
Great idea. It is also an important one given the privacy issues that are often not fully explained to parents, or designed to deceive districts.
Privacy is a big concern. Congress just passed a bill allowing companies to sell the trail of an individual’s computer “cookies” to third party vendors without knowledge or consent. Corporations keep extending their reach without most people being the wiser.
Mr. Singer,
Thank you so much for your post. I too was astonished when last year my 3rd grader came home to tell me that she had to type a five paragraph essay on waterfalls on her state test. A teacher that I shared my concern with said that the test was untimed and she would have all week to work on it, but, she could only work on it on the testing computer, using no pencils or paper. My daughter told me about sitting for hours in front of the computer trying to type each letter. (In our school of 600 students, only a few computer carts are available to use) In third grade, our students are no way proficient in keyboarding and computer word processing to measure the skills and knowledge they possess.
As an educator, I understand the need for assessments. It is this way we track our student’s growth as well as our effectiveness as teachers. Progress monitoring is crucial to planning instruction as well as larger learning goals. I do love having my students ‘show me what they know.’ It fills them with pride, as they realize they have tackled something tough and now can do it. Large state testing fills kids, teachers, and parents with worries about what students “don’t know,” versus celebrating what they do and enjoying the learning journey to get there. Thank you for your thought-provoking post, and I wish you a wonderful testing week with your daughter!
“As an educator, I understand the need for assessments.”
I hope you also understand that the term “assessment” is not synonymous with “testing” and that progress monitoring does not require the seemingly ubiquitous 5-10 question (mulitple choice?) quiz, which seems to be the current weapon of choice. How does the child who does not do well on a quiz react? Is there a discussion of what they didn’t understand and why or is there a variation of the “you have to try harder” meme, which may or may not have anything to do with their performance.
I don’t mean to berate you. As a former special education teacher, I am very aware of the shortcomings of tests as a way of evaluating the potential of students.
So when your daughter gets a job later that requires work under pressure, can she just opt out it and do creative writing? You should instead give your daughter a lesson in resilience. We may hate some stuff, but we gotta do it.
Also you misunderstand what these tests measure. Even the tests that are not speeded, they measure the ability to retrieve relevant information from long-term memory in milliseconds. They measure indirectly whether students have automatized basic skills so that they can compile them into long performance chains effortlessly. How fluent and effortless is your daughter with mental math? Instant calculations will guide her finances later on, not Picasso’s blue period.
Some people in this blog just don’t know enough about memory to make sensible decisions about children.
Hyman,
I humbly disagree. These state tests are meaningless. They measure your ability to select one of four possible answers to a question. They refer usually to decontextualized test.
Thinking does not have anything in common with picking the right answer to a question. Thinking involves an inquiry into what is the right question. Life never presents you with situations in which you are required to find the right answer to an arbitrary question. Most answers involve nuance, and in most circumstances there is more than one right answer or none at all.
As to practical matters, the teacher doesn’t get the results until the student is no longer in her class. The student is not allowed to know what she got right or wrong and not allowed to discuss the test. The test is shrouded in secrecy. No one learns anything.
Are the slaps at arts education, creative writing, learning about Picasso…and contributors to this blog… necessary? What a strange theory of education you seem to have. Memorize and regurgitate information? Sounds like you want performance from a programmed robot, not a person.
It’s good to have a wide base of knowledge, but our labor force (and therefore our economy) is better off with creative thinking and problem solving skills than the “resilience” to press buttons “under pressure”. So are people in voting booths. Life is neither a quiz show nor a reality show.
And speaking of memory and the human brain, as an additional, anecdotal example, all the neurosurgeons with whom I’ve been personally acquainted over the years applied, I believe, both knowledge and creative thinking in the diagnoses they described. Opt out of oversimplification. Opt Out of mandated standardized tests.
His daughter is in second grade, for Pete’s sake! The information she needs to retrieve in milliseconds does not require a standardized test to assess. do you even have the slightest understanding of the “mental math” required of a second grader? What a grim view you have of what education should look like!
Memories are not retrieved by the brain in “milliseconds” at any rate..
Research done with MRI indicates at least ten times that: on the order of a hundred milliseconds.
But hey, who cares what the brain is capable of, right?
We gotta test those kids’ brains even if what we are testing for is not physically possible.
And fail them if their brain can’t respond as fast as we think it should.
I wonder how fast the brain processes the information that you want to walk before you do. I wouldn’t think that any conscious mediation is required, but I still can’t imagine movement in thousandths of a second, especially at my age!
Should have said a “hundred times that”
H,
•A classroom teacher can effectively assess a 2nd grader’s mental math fluency. With research-based programs like TERC, mental math strategies are developed in lessons that have students describe how they reached their answer. The time spent on metacognition probably has a better payoff than time on multiple choice items.
•Re “Instant calculations will guide her finances later”: Teacher modeling of converting percent to fractions/calculating discounts around grades 5,6 are probably most effective. NJ, OH and other states now require a High School level personal finance/financial literacy course for graduation.
•A successful career isn’t an either/or scenario. Dan Weiss, president of Metropolitan Museum, has an MBA from Yale with experience at Booz, Allen plus doctorate in art history. Why put down knowledge of Picasso?
Hyman,
The goals you note are good ones, you are just forgetting what it is to be seven years old. Learning to be waked in the winter dark for school, how to get oneself dressed and groomed on a schedule, teamwork required for the family to get out of the house on time– for starters– are big at seven. Resilience is required and developed. Memory retrieval is part of nearly everything learned and practiced, by many different methods, during the school day. Both skills are called on as one begins adapting oneself to quizzes, and to a modicum of homework at the end of the day. Standardized testing is artificial, abstract, inappropriately applied at this age, making it its own kind of animal that has to be taught separately, stealing time from developing concrete skills, yielding nothing of value to teacher or student.
Hymen,
What is your experience with these tests?
Who taught you to think this way? To say such things?
Private school graduates would not defend these tests because they do not take them. Did you attend private school? Do you work for someone who did?