Standardized tests are great at measuring what they are designed to: student’s abilities to score well on a sterile test with a specific format, centered on a limited subset of knowledge deemed critical by some committee. We know that there is so much more to learning and education than what is on these tests. Too many of our students’ abilities fall outside of their narrow scope and are not measured. While standardized tests have demonstrated gaps between the educational opportunities for certain subsets of learners in this country, they have not offered any helpful solutions to educational inequity. It’s past time to reject the deficit thinking of standardized testing as a path forward.
The first thing that I would “measure” to determine a school’s effectiveness is student, parent, and community feedback. Schools would send multiple surveys throughout the year to elicit feedback from the community about the culture and effectiveness of the school. Regular meetings would connect students, teachers, and the community to reflect on school practices and local opportunities for students to learn and contribute.
Head on over to Edweek to read the rest and some thoughtful responses from other educators too.
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One and done Professional Development is ineffective. Here’s a great little post about questions you should be asking before you hire a consultant. I would be glad to develop a vision with you!
Summer dates are filling up fast. Please reach out to me at mikejkaechele@gmail.com if you would like to discuss how I could partner with your school for Project Based Learning, Transformative SEL workshop or coaching options.
I have been against standardization for a long time. Standardized testing is a billion dollar industry in this country. So apparently it won’t go away anytime soon, which is a pathetic shame. The companies that run the tests and create all of the test prep materials have strong lobbyists who spend millions to influence policy at both the state and federal level. So as usual, business pursuits have a larger influence on policy than the viewpoints of experts, the educators in the field.
Mandated, high stakes testing shouldn’t just be skipped this year, but permanently replaced with authentic projects.
Therefore I am deeply disappointed in the Biden administration’s mandate for states to test students this spring. But I am not surprised. Poor education policy is one of the few consistently bi-partisan agendas in the United States. Going back to Reagan, every president and their Department of Education, has looked on public schools negatively, needing to be fixed. Republicans, exemplified by Betsy DeVos, seek to demonstrate public education’s failures to advocate for charters or vouchers for private schools. They also hate teacher unions. Democrats, while saying they want to improve failing schools, hold schools accountable through rigid, biased testing.
“Accountability is a word used in the field of education to scare educators into spirit-murdering dark children.”
Dr. Bettina Love
Think about it. We just went from Bush’s utopian nonsense of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Obama’s Race to the Top. Until we fix all of society’s ills and inequality there will be children left behind. The major reason that children are left behind is the caste system in the United States that divides people into different classes with different benefits. Education alone cannot fix this societal problem.
Obama’s analogy of Race to the Top is antithetical to equity. Every race that I know of has winners and losers. So Democrats are hypocritical when they want to use testing for equity. Let’s not forget that Biden was part of the Obama team and seems reluctant to find a new path. There are definitely equity issues in public education, particularly in funding structures that favor wealthy suburban districts over rural and urban areas in many states.
It’s not that public education is perfect. It’s that the government solutions of standardized curriculum, testing, and accountability don’t work.
It’s been 20 years since NCLB launched the profitable obsession with standardized testing. At best it identified inequity between different learners in schools, but offered no solutions. We now understand the problems in education and continued testing will have zero effect on solutions. Instead we need to shift pedagogy.
Basically PBL done at a high level, seated in the community with tons of student autonomy. The book gives many examples of what this looks like in different settings around the world. And all of this was written before Covid-19 shocked the world and radically challenged the system by forcing virtual, hybrid, or socially distant learning. Many others have written about how unethical, unhealthy, and unfair standardized testing is during a global pandemic. It is stressful for educators and students alike with no positive benefits. While agreeing, I want to go further and get rid of it all together.
What if we took the time and money wasted on testing and test prep and used it to radically shift schools to student-centered Project Based Learning?
At the same time that Biden was announcing that states must continue testing, Edutopia released new research supporting PBL as a better way forward. Covid-19 is a chance to re-evaluate everything about the education system. We know what’s broke. We know testing won’t fix it. PBL offers a better path for all students. True leadership would take this opportunity to make a major shift in the pedagogy of schools in this country. All students deserve the opportunity to pursue their own passions in meaningful ways. The best way for them to learn the skills that they need to be successful is by doing authentic tasks in their community and beyond.
While educators obviously cannot depend on the federal government to make the right decisions regarding testing and pedagogy, we are not powerless. We can choose to ignore test scores and shift to meaningful learning experiences with our students. When parents are brought into conversations about pedagogical shifts to Project Based Learning, they will be supportive and students will thrive. It’s on us to make this happen!
