Mercedes Schneider has written an indispensable post about standardized testing: She noticed that the annual testing mandated by the federal government is beloved by those who are farthest from the classroom and have nothing to do with teaching and learning.
Perhaps she is responding to the recent report that Betsy DeVos will not allow waivers from the mandated testing next year, since the tests are so vital, and her announcement was cheered by the Center for American Progress (a neoliberal think tank), Education Trust (led by former Secretary of Education John King), the Council of Chief State School Officers, Senator Patty Murray (ranking Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee), and Rep. Bobby Scott (chair of the House Education Committee).
Schneider writes:
This is what standardized testing has been in public schools across America ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB):
It’s like some president-backed, bipartisan Congress decided that we need to measure student physical health based on student weight. Of course, student physical health is by far too complex a concept to be captured by student weight, but let’s just put that reality aside in favor of the appearance of being able to pack a huge, complex package into a matchbox by getting those kids on the scale and putting the onus on teachers and schools to make students weight what the state (answering to the federal government in exchange for funding) decides those students should weigh.
Now, it is ridiculous on its face to hold teachers and schools responsible for student weight– which is why no bathroom scale company will guarantee that their scales are meant to be used to determine anything beyond the weight of the person standing on the scale. However, that president-backed, bipartisan Congress has decided that schools and teachers must ensure that their students achieve some predetermined optimal weight.
So. Weight-prep programs are instituted for students at risk of not achieving their state-determined optimal weights, the point of which is to drill students in scale-optimizing strategies (i.e., where to stand on the scale in order to make the weight appear higher or lower; how to push down on the scale to “weigh more”). In order to make time in the school day for these at-risk weighers to be drilled and redrilled, they must miss lunch, group sports, and playtime, but what is important to the school and to the teacher is achieving the optimal weight number so that we can tout that number, tag the student as physically healthy, keep our jobs, and collect federal dollars.
Surely we also congratulate the hungry and lethargic student for achieving that state-determined weight number. And if anyone points out that the student is hungry and lethargic, supporters of the process ignore the child and tout the number.
Be it noted that the annual standardized testing mandated by NCLB has led to cheating scandals, narrowing of the curriculum, and teaching to the test. For the past decade, there has been no change in NAEP scores.
NCLB failed. Why not admit it and move forward? Why continue to inhale the stale fumes of past policies that failed?
Why won’t prominent Democrats stop embracing NCLB and develop a vision of their own that actually helps students and teachers?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
An outstanding post. Ms. Schneider does it again!
High-stakes standardized testing is numerology and child abuse. Anyone who promotes it is promoting pseudoscience and child abuse. End it now!
NCLB left everyone behind, not only the students, but also the people of America.
Mercedes is right.
What if to test or not to test is the wrong question? What if the larger, more important question is what to teach? Testing what is currently taught, determined largely in the 1890’s, is trying to do the wrong thing “righter”. Russell Ackoff suggested that there is a critical difference between trying to do things right versus going the right thing. We have ample evidence that our current curriculum and our wasteful expenditures to measure it is not the right thing.
You mean that reading, writing, numeracy, science, history, and civics are obsolete?
I think you thoroughly refuted the tired, nonsensical argument that curriculum is outmoded. I want to point out, additionally, that when every student is being wrongfully subjected to high stakes, annual standardized testing, it is callous and underhanded to ask “What if to test or not to test is the wrong question?” in an attempt to change the subject. The tests are invalid. They are unreliable. They are harmful. They need to stop now, nearly twenty years too late.
“Standardized test scores are inadequate for capturing the complexities of teaching and learning, can be manipulated, and can lead to exploiting the very children we profess to be helping.”
Standardized testing is deeply flawed, and our preoccupation with is unhealthy for students and us as a culture. I can remember taking standardized tests in my elementary school many years ago. I can also remember my own children taking standardized tests thirty years ago. I can also remember standardized testing when I started teaching in New York where tests were only given in grades 3, 6 and 8. The tests were not the focus of instruction. They were like a litmus test, and no high stakes were attached to them.
This casual relationship with standardized testing disappeared when an interest in privatizing our public schools became an agenda and high stakes were introduced. Privatizers have been misusing standardized testing for the past twenty years. This obsession with testing is unhealthy for vulnerable poor students. It is an abusive practice that has led to closing public schools and moving poor minority students into separate and unequal schools instead of insisting that the government invest in these students and fairly fund their schools. Despite the failure of such practice, we keep repeating the mistakes of the past. Now that poor students have become monetized, privatizers continuously push for more students to be funneled into private schools. There is zero evidence that this is making a positive difference. It causes massive disruption in inner city schools for no perceivable advantage to students.
NCLB popularized the expression “You can’t fatten a hog by weighing it.”
Mercedes has a version of this.
The absence of standardized tests in the visual arts is a blessing, unless you are an art teacher who is graded/rated on the test scores of students you do not teach. That was one of several stupid recommendation coming from subcontractors for Race to the Top “implementation.”
a stupid and, for many teachers, devastating recommendation: blame took out so many dedicated educators
“Stop fiddling with that ventilator and give that child some privacy so he can take that standardized test for which we paid our consultants a pretty penny. And stop obsessing with his breathing tube. He can still hold a pencil!”
That’s the message in a nutshell from our nutshell Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has just put her feet down and in her mouth by warning the nation that there will be no more waivers for K-12 “summative assessments” requirements for the entire 2010-2021 school year, come what may with the pandemic.
“Charity does not build character and self-reliance and it sends the wrong message”, said her spokesperson who moonlights as the caretaker of her family yachts.
Nothing in DeVos’s actual statement even hints at the possibility of any flexibility. With intrepid resolve and pursed lips she might as well have added “Wherever the pandemic leads us, it leads. By refusing to be led we will meet this challenge and overcome obstacles. To do otherwise would be to fail our students and abandon the bipartisan reforms we worked so diligently to shove down throats that gagged at first but then obediently swallowed. We reached across the aisle and got in some good punches”.
The Secretary expressed an indomitable faith in the sanctity of test proctoring. ” Even if a seismic public health crisis were to exist, which our exam peddlers tell us it won’t, the interests of our children demand that it be pre-empted and their assessment worthiness take precedence over their mortal destiny, if necessary. Sometimes freedom demands that the roulette wheel be spun and it is our duty and blessing to do that for children who cannot do it for themselves. That is the bottom-line we all share with our contractors, consultants, think-tank appendages and bag-people”.
An open microphone, real or imagined, would show up her closed mind, but not illuminate it.
Betsy DeVos’s Senate confirmation as Education Secretary was by the narrowest of margins. It required the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence. Although he was able to avoid the capsizing of her appointment, the waters of the Sea of Acceptance have always remained peculiarly elusive and aptly treacherous for her.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and others have explained that right now, the priority should be “struggling with the daily realities of remote learning” and the perils of returning to a potentially unsafe working environment.
De Vos doesn’t understand that, not because she’s intellectually incapable but because she’s demagogically pig-headed. She’s mired in the fictional reality of an alternate doctrinal universe that she feels is suitable for children whether they’re in their home’s hearth, the playground, the classroom or the CCU.
She is singularly unlikable, even for a villain.
The antidote to this type of treatment is to refuse the test. Not only are the tests useless to teachers and cruel to students, they are a vehicle of more privatization. Opt out!