Lower skill students spend even more time on test prep rather than learning
Sophie Quinton, January 23, 2015, National Journal, Is Standardized Testing a Civil Rights Issue?, http://www.nationaljournal.com/education/Is-Standardized-Testing-Civil-Rights-Issue DOA: 10-26-15
But many edu cat ors say that the cur rent tests used to meas ure stu dent pro gress—and hold schools and teach ers ac count able—don’t meas ure learn ing well. “Stand ard ized tests meas ure the wrong things,” Steph en Laz ar, a teach er at Har vest Col legi ate High School, told the packed hear ing room. They meas ure mind less re pe ti tion of facts, he said.
Pres sure to raise stu dent test scores can turn classes in to cram ming ses sions. Laz ar said he spends the en tire month of May train ing his stu dents to pass the Re gents, New York state ex ams. “The learn ing and op por tun ity gap widens” when stu dents with low scores spend so much time on test prep, while stu dents with high scores can take on more com plex as sign ments, he said.
Hurts Minorities Low scores leave minorities in disadvantageous educational programs
FairTest – National Organization for Fair and Open Testing, Racial Justice and Standardized Educational Testing, http://fairtest.org/sites/default/files/racial_justice_and_testing_12-10.pdf DOA: 10-26-15
Young people of color, particularly those from low-income families, have suffered the most as the explosion of high-stakes standardized testing in U.S. public education has undermined equity and school quality. Positive assessment alternatives that will help these students and their schools do exist. They must be fought for and won in the policy arena.
Decades of research demonstrate that African American, Latino and Native American students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience the following problems with high-stakes testing, from early childhood through college entrance:
_They disproportionately fail state or local high school graduation exams. Those tests provide no social or educational benefit. They do not improve college or employment readiness. Not having a diploma leads to higher rates of unemployment and imprisonment and lower rates of forming stable families.ii
_Students in these groups are more likely to be held back in grade because of low test scores. Grade retention produces no long-term academic benefits; it undermines self-esteem and doubles the likelihood of dropping out. Boys are subject to this damage more often than are girls.iii
_Because, on average, students of color score lower on college admissions tests (SAT and ACT), many capable youth are denied entrance or access to so-called "merit" scholarships, contributing to the huge racial gap in college enrollments and completion.iv
_Schools at times suspend, expel, "counsel out" or otherwise remove students with low scores in order to boost school results and escape test-based sanctions mandated by the federal government's "No Child Left Behind" law, at great cost to the youth and ultimately society.v
_As Claude Steele and his colleagues have demonstrated, "stereotype threat" increases the likelihood that students of color will have inaccurately low scores. Stereotype threat means that students who are aware of racial and gender stereotypes about their group’s intellectual ability score lower on standardized tests perceived to measure academic aptitude. In effect, the use of high-stakes testing in an overall environment of racial inequality perpetuates that inequality through the emotional and psychological power of the tests over the test-takers.vi
_High stakes testing causes additional damage to the many students of color who are English language learners. The tests are often inaccurate for ELLs, leading to misplacement or retention. ELLs are, alongside students with disabilities, those least likely to pass graduation tests.vii
_African Americans, especially boys, are disproportionately placed or misplaced in special education, frequently based on test results. These programs often fail to fully educate themviii
Tests just rank students along economic and racial lines, increasing inequalities
Rethinking Schools, Spring 1999, http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/13_03/edit133.shtml DOA 10-26-15
Rather than grappling with these issues, too many politicians have seized on a simplistic formula for reform: more standardized tests, especially "high stakes" tests. Nationwide, states and school districts are forcing a growing number of children to take "high stakes" standardized tests and, on the basis of test scores, children may be retained, denied access to a preferred high school, or, in some cases, even refused a high school diploma. That's not public accountability, it's discrimination.
Dating back to the development of IQ tests at the turn of the century, standardized tests have been used to sort and rank children, most reprehensibly along racial and class lines, and to rationalize giving more privileges to the already privileged. Indeed the first standardized tests were developed by eugenicists anxious for "scientific" data to prove their theories of biological determinism.
Standardized testing penalizes diversity
Anya Kamatez, journalist and education writer, 2015, The Test – Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But you don’t have to be, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the major testing law, was intended to “close the achievement gap.” It sought to hold schools accountable, not just for results averaged over all students, but also for the performance of each historically lower-performing group of students: the poor, African Americans, Hispanics, English language learners, and those with a learning disability. The unintended consequence of that laudable intention is that the more of these subgroups a school has, the more chances it has to fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) targets. In other words, schools that serve the poor and ethnic minorities are more likely to fail NCLB tests and be punished or closed. The number of so-called turnaround schools spiked from around one thousand a year in the mid-2000s to a peak of six thousand in 2010– 2011. The number of schools shut down has been more volatile, but it has risen from around one thousand a year in the early 2000s to between fifteen hundred and two thousand a year in the late 2000s. School reorganizations, granted, sometimes bring improvement, but in all cases they disrupt communities, and this is why they have sparked protests from Detroit to Newark to Chicago to Houston to Baltimore. Leaders of diverse schools have two rational responses to this situation. The hard way is to redouble efforts to ensure the success of at-risk subgroups of students. The easy way is to cheat on the tests, or to somehow get rid of those subgroups. The case of Lorenzo Garcia, the superintendent of the El Paso Independent School District, shows the lengths that some school leaders are willing to go in response to high-stakes testing policies— far beyond cheating, to actually interfering with the educations of hundreds of students in order to manipulate the statistics. Garcia collected $ 56,000 in bonuses for the outstanding improvement in scores posted by his overwhelmingly low-income, immigrant, Hispanic student population on the Texas tenth-grade test. Over his six-year tenure from 2004 to 2010, as a federal court found, Garcia achieved this improvement in scores by systematically targeting lower-achieving students and stopping them from taking the tests. He and his coconspirators used a wide variety of methods. Students would be transferred to charter schools. Older students arriving from Mexico, many of whom were fleeing the drug wars in nearby Ciudad Juárez, were incorrectly placed in ninth grade. Credits were deleted from transcripts or grades changed to move students forward or back a grade in order to keep them out of the tenth-grade test. Because of the manipulation, enrollment at some high schools dropped 40 or 50 percent between ninth and tenth grades. Those intentionally held back were sometimes allowed to catch up before graduation through “turbo-mesters,” “earning” a semester’s worth of credits in a few hours on the computer. Sometimes truant officers would visit students at home and warn them not to come to school on test days. And sometimes students were openly encouraged to drop out. El Paso citizens called their lost students “los desaparecidos,” or the disappeared. Linda Hernandez-Romero’s daughter was one of those held back in the ninth grade. She dropped out of high school and had three children by the age of twenty-one. Hernandez-Romero told reporters, “She always tells me: ‘Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn’t smart. I guess I’m not, Mom, look at me.’ There’s not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it’s so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse.” Rick Perry’s Texas Education Agency found Garcia innocent of these allegations, but a federal prosecution resulted in $ 236,500 in fines and a forty-two-month prison sentence for Garcia. Garcia’s case is exceptional because it resulted in jail time. But this kind of systematic discrimination in response to high-stakes testing has been documented in at least three states for over a decade, as discussed in Chapter 3. Not only do they motivate blatant discrimination, but high-stakes standardized tests also interfere with educators’ ability to meet individual learning needs. Overall, 13 percent of schoolchildren are now labeled LD, for learning disabled. Under a high-stakes system both parents and schools have good reasons to push for an official diagnosis for any student who has trouble sitting perfectly still for ninety minutes every day for three weeks at a stretch. The diagnosis means extra time to take the tests, modifications, extra help, and resources. For schools, if more kids with mild learning differences end up slotted into the LD category, statistics dictate that scores will rise in both the general and LD groups. But the long-term consequences of aggressively sorting, stigmatizing, and medicating kids are unknown. In particular, the number of kids on medication for attention disorders like ADD and ADHD has risen from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2013. Leading doctors who study this disorder have called the trends a “national disaster”— not a medical epidemic but rather one of overzealous treatment driven by a profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry. The good test-takers are getting shortchanged too. Traditional standardized tests provide the most accurate information on students toward the middle of the intellectual bell curve. If a child either “hits the ceiling” with a perfect score or bottoms out on the test, her score will tell teachers very little about which areas she needs to work on. Not surprisingly, there is evidence that in the most test-driven school settings students who score well above or well below proficient get less individualized attention because teachers instead work intensively with the students who are just below proficient, or “on the bubble.” Promoting a single standard of proficiency for every child may be efficient for policymakers, but it flies in the face of current educational theory, which celebrates the individual learning path of each child. Allison Keil is the codirector of the highly popular Community Roots Charter School in New York City. Each class in her school is team taught and includes gifted, mainstream, and special needs students working together. She calls the tests distracting, demoralizing, and confusing for many of her students and their families. “A child with an IEP [individualized education plan, e.g., those with a learning disability] has specific goals. She may be working incredibly hard all year, meeting the promotional criteria that she and her teacher have set together, and then she gets a 1 (below proficient) on the test and feels like a failure. It’s a huge disservice to the progress she’s made.” Rebecca Ellis expresses the identical frustration. She is a single mother of a nine-year-old autistic boy named Jackson in Mandeville, Louisiana, north of New Orleans. I met them through a mutual friend at the raucous sidelines of a Mardi Gras parade; her younger, typically developing son was up on a ladder, trying to catch beads from passing floats, while Jackson ignored the racket, playing with a small plastic puzzle. “I know today, in 2014, that Jackson is never going to pass one of these standardized assessments,” she tells me. “He took the Iowa test last year and scored in the second percentile.” It frustrates her that there is no official recognition of the real progress he is making, such as in interacting with other children, because there is no room for nuance in the standards. Rather than help him achieve his social development goals, the school’s resources are diverted toward drilling him on math and reading concepts that are far out of his ken. Standardization is the enemy of diversity. In our high-tech era, what humans have to offer is not robotic sameness but rather variation, adaptability, and flexibility. Rating students as 1, 2, 3, or 4 in a few limited skills does nothing to promote, support, or recognize that human value or individual potential. Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (p. 26). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.
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