Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate

Time Trades-Off

Students now spending 25% of the year on test prep and test taking

Drake Baer, May 15, 2015, Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/anya-kamenetz-the-test-interview-2015-5, How Standardized Tests like the SAT have poisoned America’s classrooms, DOA: 10-26-15

In "The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing — But You Don't Have To Be,"  veteran education reporter Anya Kamenetz investigates the $2 billion dollar standardized test industry.  Testing is thoroughly entrenched in the American education system. Students in grades three through 10 spend up to 25% of the year engaged in test prep instead of actually learning, she reports

The trade-off undermines the traditional curriculum

Frank Breslin, July 23, 2015, Huffington Post, Retired High School Teacher, Why America Demonizes Its Teachers – Part 5: What’s Wrong with Standardized Testing, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-breslin/why-america-demonizes-its_b_7860916.html DOA: 7-23-15

Standardized tests waste time and money

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

2. Tests waste time and money. Not only do standardized tests address only a fraction of what students need to learn, but we’re also spending ages doing it. At schools like Leaf, time given to standardized tests is more than the weeks spent taking the tests; it also includes practice tests, field tests, prep days, Saturday school, workbooks for homework. It includes afternoon periods full of movies for kids “burnt” from the tests. And standardized tests are not just state-mandated accountability tests. There are independent national assessments like Iowa Basic Skills Tests and the “Nation’s Report Card,” international tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), diagnostic tests such as Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), supplementary subject tests in social studies and science, and local benchmark tests so districts can predict how their students will do on the state tests. In the later grades, of course, come the SAT and ACT and their accompanying practice and prequel tests, now starting as soon as seventh grade. Reports from across the country suggest that students spend about three days taking state tests in each of grades three through ten but up to 25 percent of the school year engaged in testing and test prep. By the time a student graduates high school that could translate to 585 school days— three and a quarter extra school years that they could have spent learning instead of being tested on what they already knew or, worse, didn’t know. At the outer limits, in the Pittsburgh Public Schools in the 2013– 2014 school year, students in kindergarten through twelfth grade took a total of more than 270 tests required by the state or district. The most tested grade was fourth, with 33 required tests, just shy of one a week on average. These included the state Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in math, reading, and science, for teacher evaluations; a three-part reading test; the DIBELS Next three-part reading tests; plus twenty more benchmark reading tests and four benchmark math tests created by district staff. Ongoing and frequent assessment is part of good educational practice. Good teachers give lots of formative feedback— steady little nudges that let students know how they’re progressing. But they draw on a full palette of assessment to do that: calling on the class during a lecture, pop quizzes, sending students up to the board to solve homework problems, daily journal entries, lab reports, peer evaluations and group critiques, research papers, presentations, and final exams. Standardized tests, however, restrict the palette to black and white. They aren’t in teachers’ control, so they aren’t integrated into teaching and learning in the same way that formative feedback is. Often the more a kid is struggling in school, the more time she spends taking standardized tests. Response to intervention (RTI) is a heavily assessment-driven approach to schooling that’s being used to some extent in 60 to 70 percent of schools. Assessment is “at the front end” of RTI, said Louis Danielson, who was in the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs from 1976 until 2008. With RTI, “Assessment,” he said, “plays a key role in decision-making. You’re screening to identify at-risk kids.” Under RTI, at the beginning of first grade every student takes a reading test. Those who score at the low end are assessed every other week to determine whether they’re making sufficient progress. If they aren’t, after six to eight weeks they’ll be eligible for more targeted interventions, like tutoring or small-group work. The testing continues, up to once or twice a week. Richard Halverson, a professional of educational leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how technologies change schools, calls RTI “a national effort to make special ed into all of school— so all kids get assessed, all get learning plans and the kids who struggle get assessed even more. It’s the enshrinement of pervasive assessment as the model of education.” Pervasive assessment is a nightmare version of school for most students. It’s like burning thirsty plants in a garden under a magnifying glass, in the hope that they will grow faster under scrutiny. That’s the time factor. What about money? Are we spending too much on these tests, most of which goes to a handful of private companies? A 2012 report by the Brookings Institution found $ 669 million in direct annual spending on assessments in forty-five states, or $ 27 per student. But that’s just the beginning. The cost rises up to an estimated $ 1,100 when you add in the logistical and administrative overhead (e.g., the extra cost of paying teachers to prep for, administer, and grade the tests) plus the instructional time lost. Leaf, for example, employs a full-time testing coordinator, though it has fewer than two hundred students. According to a 2006 analysis by Bloomberg Markets, over 60 percent of the test companies’ revenue comes from prep materials, not the tests themselves. The profit margins on No Child Left Behind tests are as low as 3 percent, but practice tests and workbooks are more cheaply produced and claim as high as a 21 percent profit margin. Many informed observers say we’d do better to have more expensive tests and fewer of them. “The reliance on multiple choice tests is a very American obsession,” said Dylan Wiliam, an expert on the use of assessments that improve classroom practice. “We think nothing of spending $ 300– $ 400 on examining kids at the end of high school in England.” It’s a case of penny wise and pound foolish, critics like Wiliam say: you waste billions of dollars and untold hours by distorting the entire enterprise of school, preparing students to take crummy multiple-choice tests that cost only twenty-five bucks to grade. Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (p. 17). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

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