Improvements in Education

Test scores needed to assess learning and improve education

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, Martin R. West, Matthew M. Chingos and Mark Dynarski, January 8, 2015, The Case for Annual Testing, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/01/08-chalkboard-annual-testing DOA: 10-25-15

Scores that students receive on standardized tests administered in schools are strongly predictive of later life outcomes that are of great value to those students and the nation, after controlling for all the other observable characteristics of those students that are associated with later success.  What’s more, gains in test scores that result from interventions such as being assigned to a particularly effective teacher or attending a school facing accountability pressure also predict improvements in adult outcomes.  In other words, how much students learn in school makes a big difference in their lives, and standardized tests capture valid information on this.  As such, information on school performance that does not include information on student learning as measured by standardized tests will be badly compromised, like information on the performance of a publicly traded stock that does not include its historical returns.

Recent work by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff on teacher effectiveness utilizes data from test score data in reading and math in grades 3-8 in New York City linked to IRS records for the same students as they became adults.  Our focus here is on these linked records and what they tell us about the predictive power of test scores, rather than on the story they tell about teacher effectiveness that was the focus of the Chetty et al. study.  The school records of the study sample provide test scores as well as a rich set of control variables, including student variables (e.g., gender, ethnicity, special education status, record of suspensions, and limited English proficiency) and school variables (e.g., class size, teacher experience).  The tax records include individual earnings, information on college attendance, and child dependents (from which mothers who were teenagers when they gave birth could be identified).

Without controlling for other student characteristics and school variables the association between student test scores in grades 3-8 and later outcomes is huge, but it could reflect, for example, the impact of ethnicity or limited English proficiency independent of student learning.  With all controls in place the most important of these omitted variables are accounted for.  The association is still very large and most plausibly a function of the academic knowledge that is being assessed on the standardized tests.

The figure below (generated by the authors of this piece from information in Appendix Table 3 of Chetty et al.) represents the relationship between earnings at age 28 for students from the 5^th to the 95^th percentile in test scores in reading and math in grades 3-8, after adjusting earnings for the influence of all the control variables mentioned above.

To compare two points on the graph: relative to individuals who as students were at the 30^th percentile, individuals who were at 70^th percentile in test scores in elementary and middle school were earning 13.6% more as young adults.  To repeat, the association is net of the other variables that entered into the prediction as controls.  Some of these controls, such as special education status, capture the impact of student knowledge as measured on standardized tests, and thus bias downward the association that is represented in Figure 1.  Nevertheless, the estimated impact on earnings is very large. 

Similarly large impacts are found on college attendance, the quality of college attended, the quality of the neighborhood of residence, and giving birth as a teenager among females.  Some of these relationships surely reflect the impact of students’ innate ability on their adult outcomes, but many studies have found that interventions that impact test scores also have impacts on later-life outcomes, including class-size reduction, school accountability, charter schools, and exposure to highly effective teachers. Given these strong predictive and causal relationships, who among us that wants to improve education would choose to ignore how much students are learning in school as measured by standardized tests?  Unless the federal government mandates the collection and dissemination of this information, we will be bereft of one of the best indicators we currently have of school performance.

Need to measure student growth to improve schools

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, Martin R. West, Matthew M. Chingos and Mark Dynarski, January 8, 2015, The Case for Annual Testing, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/01/08-chalkboard-annual-testing DOA: 10-25-15

Test scores matter for any form of accountability, including market-based accountability in which parents choose the schools their children attend and funding follows students to their school of choice.  Proponents of charter schools and open-enrollment in public schools will find that the informational fuel of their favored version of school reform will evaporate without valid information on annual student gains.

The removal of the requirement of annual testing will, necessarily, all but eliminate school-based accountability for the learning of subgroups of children because, as Whitehurst and Lindquist have shown, testing only samples of children or only one grade of children often leads to sample sizes for subgroups such as English learners and blacks that are too small to generate reliable estimates for the school as a whole.  Thus, those concerned with equity should strongly support annual testing in multiple grades.

Unless individual students are tested in adjacent grades as they move through school, which requires annual testing, it is impossible to measure gains in student achievement from one year to the next.  This has three consequences.  

First, schools that serve a disproportionate share of disadvantaged children won’t be credited for their success in improving the academic abilities of their students because improvement won’t be visible, only status.  Thus, if children are only tested in 6^th grade, the elementary school that moves its students from the 10^th percentile in math to the 40^th percentile from 3^rd to 6^th grade will look exactly the same as the school whose students performed at the 50^th percentile in grade three and fell to the 40^th percentile in grade six. 

For the same reasons, it will be impossible to differentiate teachers based on their ability to generate gains in student learning in their classrooms.  Such value-added measures require a test-based estimate of the difference between how much math or language skills individual students have when entering vs. graduating from a teacher’s classroom.  This requires annual testing.  We have learned over the last decade just how important differences in teacher effectiveness are to student outcomes.  The ability to collect and use this information to support improvements in teacher preparation, professional development, and personnel actions will be lost without annual testing.

Finally, eliminating annual testing would prevent researchers and policymakers from judging the effectiveness of new education programs in which the research design depends on knowledge of students' recent achievement. By hampering our ability to learn about what’s working and what’s not, jettisoning annual testing would have a negative effect on the rate of improvement in achievement over time. 

Standardized tests help identify strengths and weaknesses of both teachers and students

Debbie Thompson, 2009, Why Standardized Testing is Important in the Homeschool Environment, http://www.triangleeducationassessments.com/standardizedtesting.pdf DOA: 10-25-15

First, standardized achievement tests can improve

•

diagnosis of students’ and teachers’ strengths and

weaknesses. One test should not suffice for the total end

of grade assessment but hopefully, test results will

corroborate what you see on a daily basis. Results can

help guide us in knowing how a student compares to the

average national student. If a child’s scores seem to

indicate that they are falling behind academically, we can

get help instead of allowing the problem to persist.

Likewise, a student that is performing above and beyond

their grade level might be given an extra challenge, be

placed into a gifted program, or be granted opportunities

to pursue extra interests. Analyzing test results can help

an educator evaluate the effectiveness of a curriculum or

to help assess if instructional methods are a good match

to a child’s learning style. Clues to achievement

strengths and weaknesses as well as instructional

strengths or weaknesses can be ascertained from

analyzing achievement test results.

Schools use the information to improve

Dr. Herbert Walberg is a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute and chairman of its Board of Directors. He is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and a professor emeritus and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on educational productivity and human accomplishments, August 1, 2011, Stop the War Against Standardize Tests, http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-submission/2011/08/01/stop-war-against-standardized-tests DOA: 10-25-15

If standardized tests are misused, of course, the program and student learning may be defective. When standardized tests are used appropriately, a great deal can be learned about how well schools function. That information allows educators and policymakers to make better-informed conclusions about how much students are learning, which in turn allows them to make better-informed decisions about improving programs.

Students benefit directly when they take tests that offer information on how well they have mastered the material intended for learning. School reading and mathematics skills, for example, can be precisely specified, and as students learn the skills, they benefit from ongoing information tailored to their specific, individual progress. Computers streamline this process by providing immediate feedback about correct and incorrect responses far more quickly and with much greater patience than teachers and tutors can provide.

Tests needed to get data needed to improve education

Tamara Hiller & Stephanie Johnson, May 5, 2015, Third Way, John Oliver is Wrong About Standardized Testing,, http://www.thirdway.org/third-way-take/john-oliver-is-wrong-on-standardized-testing DOA: 10-25-15

Second, while there may be legitimate questions surrounding who should be responsible for designing tests, Oliver glaringly omits the reality that tests can and do serve an important purpose in providing teachers and parents with critical data about student performance. In fact, the reason annual standardized testing emerged during the NCLB-era was because there were legitimate concerns that many students—often those historically marginalized—were not receiving actual instruction, and expectations for their performance were being set shockingly low. Without annual testing, there was no way to find out how students were doing until it was too late. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests that existed prior to NCLB only tested a small sample of students in various subjects in different years, meaning there was no systematic way to check whether or not a child was on grade level in reading or math. So, unlike what Oliver would have you believe, the actual purpose of testing is to make sure that specific kids, or groups of kids, are not allowed to slip through the cracks year after year.

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