Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate

Spending time on test prep undermines the quality of education in poor communities

Quinn Mulholland, May 14, 2015, Harvard Politics, The Case Against Standardized Testing, http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/case-standardized-testing/, DOA: 10-25-15

The schools that have been forced to devote the most time to test prep are those in the most disadvantaged communities, because they have to achieve the biggest increases in test scores under NCLB’s mandates. Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, explained in an interview with the HPR, “In those kinds of schools, the curriculum becomes test prep: doing worksheets and practice tests and getting ready for the big test.” A report from the Center for American Progress substantiates Schaeffer’s claim, demonstrating that urban high school students spend as much as 266 percent more time taking standardized tests than their suburban counterparts do.

This increased focus on test prep has had a profoundly negative impact on the quality of education many students receive. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in America, said in an interview with the HPR that the narrow focus on tested subjects causes students to become disengaged at school. “Most kids I know are so anxious about the high-stakes consequences of these tests right now that they hate school, but yet they can be really engaged if we engage them through music or through art or through projects.”

Because mat and science scores are values, schools devalue teaching of the humanities

Quinn Mulholland, May 14, 2015, Harvard Politics, The Case Against Standardized Testing, http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/case-standardized-testing/, DOA: 10-25-15

Because only math and reading test scores count towards a school’s “adequate yearly progress” under NCLB, schools have deemphasized, and in some cases completely stopped, teaching things like “social studies, literature, art, music, physical education, and other important topics where test scores do not result in judgments of school quality,” writes Richard Rothstein in his 2004 book Class and Schools. A 2006 study by the Center on Education Policy supported this claim, finding that since NCLB was passed, 71 percent of school districts cut back on subjects like history and music so they could spend more time on the tested subjects.

Test prep trades-off with instructional time

Randi Weingarten , President, American Federation of Teachers , July 2013, Testing More, Teaching Less: What America’s Obsession with Student Tests Costs in Money and Loss Instructional Time,” http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/news/testingmore2013.pdf DOA: 10-25-15

Time spent on test preparation reduces instructional time by the same amount, giving rise to great concern among educators and parents. Test-preparation time has grown substantially with the expansion of state-mandated testing, the proliferation of interim/ benchmarking assessments and the expansion of high-stakes consequences attached to test scores.

Undermines Creativity

Standardized educational systems undermine the creativity that makes the American system great

Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 2013, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card

Yong Zhao sees the decentralization and absence of standardization in American education as one of its strengths. He writes, “American education has many problems, but to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of education except for all others that have been tried. The decentralized system with local governance is a fundamentally sound framework that has evolved within the American context, that has led to America’s economic prosperity and scientific preeminence so far, and that is being studied and copied by others.” He worries that in our eagerness to copy nations with higher test scores, we may sacrifice the qualities of individualism and creativity that have been the source of our nation’s economic, social, and technological success. 13 Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 1458-1459). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Yong Zhao writes that China wants to transform itself from “a labor-intensive, low-level manufacturing economy into an innovation-driven knowledge society.” Innovative people, he says, create an innovation-driven society. “Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students who excel at regurgitating spoon-fed knowledge.” He asks the obvious questions: “If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it?” Why would Americans “allow the government to dictate what their children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated”? Continuing to pursue this course of action, he warns, can do serious damage to American education because it demoralizes educators and at the same time “denies the real cause of education inequality— poverty, funding gaps, and psychological damages caused by racial discrimination— by placing all responsibilities on schools and teachers.”

The Chinese public “seems eager to embrace what is viewed as a more liberal and creative system.” Zhao quotes a Chinese journalist who was a visiting scholar in Arizona in the 1990s. The journalist admired American education because it had “no uniform textbooks, no standardized tests, no ranking of students, this is American education.” The journalist’s ten-year-old son attended an American school, and the father was impressed: American classrooms don’t impart a massive amount of knowledge into their children, but they try every way to draw children’s eyes to the boundless ocean of knowledge outside the school; they do not force their children to memorize all the formulae and theorems, but they work tirelessly to teach children how to think and ways to seek answers to new questions; they never rank students according to test scores, but they try every way to affirm children’s efforts, praise their thoughts, and protect and encourage children’s desire and effort. 15 Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 1476-1477). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Zhao observed that “what the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences.” Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 1478-1480). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The attitudes and skills that Wadhwa admires are the very ones that are sacrificed by the intensive focus on standardized testing that has been foisted on American schools by federal policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Keith Baker, who worked for many years as an analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, asked, “Are international tests worth anything?” Do they predict the future of a nation’s economy? He reviewed the evidence and concluded that for the United States and about a dozen of the world’s most advanced nations, “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless. There is no association between test scores and national success, and, contrary to one of the major beliefs driving U.S. education policy for nearly half a century, international test scores are nothing to be concerned about. America’s schools are doing just fine on the world scene.” 17 Baker argued that the purveyors of doom and gloom were committing the “ecological correlation fallacy.” It is a fallacy to generalize that what is good for an individual (a higher test score, for example) must be right for the nation as a whole. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, he said, but evidence, not just an assumption, is required to make the case. To test the predictive value of the international assessments, he used the results of the First International Mathematics Study, given in 1964 to thirteen-year-olds in twelve nations. Students in the United States placed next to last, ahead of Sweden. Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (Kindle Locations 1494-1500). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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