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Children, Teachers And True Believers

Last edited May 2005, Last reviewed September 2007

It is the fourth day of school. A second grade classroom in a suburban school system has an atmosphere that is quiet and tense. The teacher, or, that is, the proctor, has just read the sample question for the children taking the CTB McGraw-Hill InView test. The test is said to provide an assessment of cognitive abilities, and, perhaps more importantly to the school leadership, it is said to anticipate achievement scores for the CTB McGraw-Hill TerraNova test that the same students will take later in the school year. The teachers, or, rather, the proctors, have been instructed not to refer to this test as a test, according to a letter sent home to the suburban parents. Still, the second grade students sitting at their desks in neat production line rows with neat production line bubble sheets to be filled out with nicely sharpened "number 2" pencils must have little doubt about what this is all about.

The children are filling out the bubble for the answer to the sample question. It is just a sample question to get them in the habit of filling out the right bubble, so the answer is obvious. Or, is it? The proctor reads from the script that the students should have filled out bubble "D". Suddenly there is confusion. One child bursts into tears. It seems that the answer to the sample question was not as obvious to a second grader as the writers of the test supposed. Many of the children are now busy erasing their incorrect answer, their confidence shaken and their questions about the process multiplying. The teacher sticks to the script and moves on, rolling her eyes to herself.

On this fourth day of school the next few hours will be spent filling out bubbles. The teachers make some mental notes. At first, the students hunker down and make a strong effort to do their best. However, this InView test is purposely written to be too difficult for these students. There are concepts underlying many questions that have not yet been introduced to these children. In order to form a bell curve of test score percentile results, it is necessary for some of the questions to be too difficult for many of the children. The point is not to determine what these children know. The point is to compare the scores of these children to other test takers in the country. By statistical comparison and association, the CTB McGraw Hill company believes it can predict how these children will perform on other tests and also the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of the children. The teacher notes that after about half the test worth of filling in bubbles to answer many questions that are too difficult, too vague, or simply mind-numbing, the eyes of the children have glazed over. The answers to the questions are coming faster to the students now because they are simply guessing.

The suburban parents who inquired about the test at the dinner table later that night had a variety of responses from the children, none of them positive. Some children were quiet about the whole affair; unsure of their performance and confused about the process. Others were indignant, recognizing the futility of the exercise and admitting that they simply guessed at the answers after losing interest. The people at CTB McGraw Hill who wrote this test may very well be able to predict student performance and cognitive ability with perfect accuracy. However, the people who wrote the test were not concerned with the school day after the test. The teachers in this district are now faced with damage control in their classrooms. Bruised egos, shaken confidence, sullen feelings and a new-found fear of test taking must all be faced by a teacher who was asked on the fourth day of school to put aside her excitement for the new school year, put aside her concern for the attitudes and self esteem of her students, and interrupt the momentum of the first week of school in order to become a robotic test proctor. Welcome to second grade, children.

Teachers and the testing

Later in the year there will be more testing. Perhaps for the second round the teachers will feel a strong temptation to go over test-taking strategies, or to cover some of the esoteric question subjects they have seen on the test before. Perhaps the teachers will spend a little more time on test preparation and a little less time on creating dynamic lesson plans. Perhaps the children will become better at filling in bubbles at the expense of learning to think for themselves.

Some would argue that there is nothing wrong with teaching to the test. As long as the test is good, they argue, what's wrong with teaching what it covers? It is wrong on many different levels. First, remember that these tests are written with questions that are designed by their nature to create a bell-curve of results. Test writers want half the students to score above and half to score below the middle. As a result, many of the questions will be obscure, difficult, or even inappropriate for the students taking the test. Doing this insures that some students cannot score well and will create the desired bell-curve results. The idea is not to rate students, but to rank them.

Furthermore, since the tests are limited in time, there is only so much information in any one subject area that can be covered by the questions. The questions cover merely a sampling of the information that a student in a particular grade would normally cover in the field of science, or social studies or math. The questions, then, are not only esoteric in nature, but they are limited in scope too.

The true believers

Among the defenders of standardized testing, there are the true believers. With the best of intentions, they sincerely believe that standardized tests, or, to use the now popular buzzwords, "assessments and accountability," are the key to improving educational quality. In fact, leading educational journals, magazines, newsletters, and conferences today all play up the idea that testing is the best way to "align" local curriculum with State standards, to hold schools "accountable," and to make decisions based on hard data instead of fuzzy interpretations. What is more, commercial interests who sell tests, who sell software to analyze tests, who offer polls and reviews of test results, and who offer means to improve test scores have all contributed to the momentum of the testing machine. The true believers even have proof--hard evidence--that the assessment and accountability movement is making real progress improving the quality of our schools.

What is the proof? Test scores. Yes, you read that correctly. The proof for the true believers that testing is making a difference is higher test scores on further tests. In any article you care to read claiming progress due to testing, you will find that the bottom line for the true believers is higher scores on still more tests. Alice in Wonderland, by comparison, seems to make perfect sense.

Never mind that norm-referenced standardized testing can narrow the focus of subject matter in a curriculum, never mind that the testing encourages rote memory over higher-order thinking, never mind that testing glosses over differences between learning styles, level of development or social background, never mind that younger students are asked to just "do their best" when they clearly cannot understand the meaning of a particular test question, never mind that their teacher must ignore their pleas for help, never mind that our older students have learned to "strategize" on tests and find the "most correct answer" instead of evaluating for themselves what is truth, what is fabricated, and what cannot be supported by the premises beneath. If the test scores are rising, so must the quality of the instruction, say the true believers.

In the world of business today, decisions are driven by data and by numbers. From marketing polling, to computer-aided design, to production line speed; from share prices, to profit analysis, to long term employee pension plans: everything in the modern business world revolves around numbers, data and analysis. In the world of science, too, precision data is the basis for advances in medicine, environmental science, exploration and more. Perhaps educators can be forgiven for thinking that the same sort of data-driven decisions could apply in schools. However, schools are not production lines, and children are not science experiments or numbers. Public schools do not have a profit motive and there is no computer-aided design for the development of human beings.

Rising test scores do not equate with rising quality of instruction. Actually, a strong case can be made that rising test scores equate with a lower quality of learning, assuming the goal is to give students the widest possible exposure to knowledge and to have them learn to think for themselves. There is only one real way to judge the quality of learning in our public schools, and that is to painstakingly evaluate each individual student over the course of each school year and over their school career for personal progress and common milestones. That means teachers who rigorously assess students one-on-one, that means parents who track and reinforce their child's progress every step of the way, and that means principals and administrators who observe, encourage and correct their staff based on one rule: the development of the individual child comes first.

The fall-back position of the true believers is this: standardized testing, or "accountability and assessment" is just one piece of the puzzle. They claim that testing is a valuable addition to the toolbox that already contains individual student assessments, parent and teacher input, and other tools. What is the harm in having some hard numbers on student performance to evaluate? Yet, there can never be a compromise with poison. Standardized testing programs simply lead to the same old horserace of comparing often meaningless percentile scores at the expense of time for the child-centered assessments and enriched learning that, admittedly, is much more difficult to implement but far more effective at producing happy, self-reliant adults.

To cite this article:

Painter, John. Children, Teachers And True Believers. (May 2005). Retrieved month x, 2xxx, from

<http://rationalamerican.com/education>