Standardized Tests Distort Schooling: Experts Reflect on Authentic Learning

Federal school policy these days is limiting what children study at school.  The tests mandated by No Child Left Behind, the federal testing law, measure students’ progress in language arts and math.  Students are also tested in science once in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school. And states had to promise to adopt college- and career-ready standards to qualify for Arne Duncan’s federal waivers from the most awful consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act.  College- and career-ready standards translate into the Common Core, one of two sets of curricula standards and the tests that accompany them. What all this means in practice is that much of what happens at school is driven by what is on the tests.

Our national obsession with standardized testing has motivated many people including parents and teachers to push back.  What about the skills that we all know determine people’s capacity to work together, to persist at their work, to question and talk about their work and about the issues citizens need to understand?  Test preparation doesn’t cover these things.  School needs to be more than test prep.

In late February Susan Engel, a professor of psychology at Williams College and founder and director of the Williams Program in Teaching, published a critique of standardized tests because, she said, neither do they show us much about what children know nor do they predict children’s success at school and in life:  “I have reviewed more than 300 studies of K-12 academic tests.  What I have discovered is startling.  Most tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and school districts predict almost nothing except the likelihood of achieving similar scores on subsequent tests.  I have found virtually no research demonstrating a relationship between those tests and measures of thinking or life outcomes.”

Engel then presents a list of seven abilities or dispositions she believes all children need to master at school. She suggests our testing ought to measure whether our schools are teaching these skills: “One key feature of the system I am suggesting is that it depends, like good research, on representative samples rather than on testing every child every year.  We’d use less data, to better effect, and free up the hours, days, and weeks now spent on standardized test prep and the tests themselves, time that could be spent on real teaching and learning.”  What are the seven abilities and dispositions Engel believes every child should develop at school?

• Reading — Every child should be able to read well by the end of elementary school and should read regularly.
• Inquiry — Schools should develop children’s natural desire to discover by helping them investigate deliberately, thoroughly and precisely.
• Flexible thinking using evidence — Children need to be able to approach a topic in different ways, reason about it and write about it.
• Conversation — Students need to practice listening and explaining, taking turns, marshalling evidence, exploring different points of view, telling stories.
• Collaboration — Children must learn to navigate their social settings and be reflective about the way people treat each other.
• Engagement — Children need to have opportunities to become absorbed and learn to concentrate.
• Well-Being — Children need to expect to feel safe at school.

I encourage you to read Engel’s essay to learn how she suggests testing can be designed to evaluate how well schools nurture these abilities.

In a profound new reflection, Mike Rose, the UCLA professor who has spent a long career observing teaching and learning, also critiques how standardized testing has narrowed what children are taught.  Rose agrees that we ought to push back against the narrowed emphasis on reading, math and a little science.  Valuing similar priorities to Engel’s, Rose wants us to think about what are often called “the soft skills”—“punctuality and responsibility, self-monitoring and time management, the ability to communicate and work with others,” but unlike Engel, Rose is not rethinking testing.

Rose worries about the way we have come to parse instruction and to imagine we can teach separate skills or dispositions each one on its own, for nobody really learns that way.  “An ineffective way to develop soft skills in children or adults is to focus on soft skills alone, to lecture about them in the abstract or run people through games or classroom exercises that aren’t grounded on meaningful, intellectually relevant activity.  If we want to foster soft skills, we’ll have to start thinking about them in close connection with the cognitive content and interpersonal dynamics of the work people do.” (Emphasis added.)

Rose describes watching adults learning in a community college setting: “I observed adults in community college occupational programs as they developed skill in areas as diverse as fashion and welding.  While it is true that some students were from the beginning better than others at showing up for class on time and organizing their assignments, as students collectively  acquired competence, soft skills developed apace.  Students became more assured, more attentive to detail, more committed to excellence, and they got better at communicating what they were doing and formed helping relationships with others.”

Rose is thinking about teaching and learning as an organic process of human development.  The things one learns and practices at school come together to form the person who is becoming more educated.

Notice that neither Engel nor Rose describes the kind of standardized testing that dominates our schools today as an essential part of education.

Parents’ Consensus on Public School Policy Challenges the Status Quo

Education writer Mike Rose and historian Michael Katz conclude the wonderful collection of essays they recently edited by regretting that, “there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current (education) reform movement.  There is an implied philosophy, and it is a basic economic/human capital one; education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability.”

According to a new national poll of American parents of school children, a poll commissioned by the American Federation of Teachers by Hart Research Associates, parents share a belief in a far more expansive philosophy of education.  The short report of the survey’s conclusions is fascinating, and I urge you to read all of the results, but for me the survey’s most important news is that parents agree that schools should accomplish several core goals.   Seventy-eight percent of parents believe school should ensure that, “all children, regardless of background, have the opportunity to succeed.”  For their own children, parents want schools to do four things:   “1) improve their knowledge and critical thinking abilities;  2) provide them with a safe learning environment;  3) educate them about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy; and  4) address their social, emotional, and health needs.”

This is, of course, not a fully elaborated philosophy of education, but it comes closer than the economic rationale being promulgated by policy makers.  Parents want equity (though we know they will frequently make housing choices, for example, that promote their own children’s interests over those of other children), and they enthusiastically endorse education that forms the child intellectually, linguistically, emotionally, and ethically.  A whole child philosophy of education.

This new opinion poll points to the need for political leadership to build on parents’ named willingness to use public schools to serve children who are currently being left behind.  Instead, as Rose and Katz describe the conversation among education policy makers, “Poverty is mentioned, but in a variety of ways it is downplayed.  So all the damage poverty does to communities and to households, to schools and to other local institutions is rarely addressed.  And it’s hard to find discussion of the economic, political, and social history of poverty, leading to an oddly antiseptic and ahistorical treatment of community, schools, and achievement.”

Among policymakers, what we have, according to Rose and Katz, is, “a rough consensus which crosses political lines, blames poor teaching, ineffective teacher preparation programs, teachers’ unions, the lack of accountability for results, and monopolistic public systems for the failures of student achievement measured, primarily, by test scores. In mainstream reform discourse, teachers and their unions emerge as the major villains, the primary stumbling blocks to assuring every child an adequate education.”

It is fascinating that in this week’s public opinion poll of parents, teachers are not the villains.  Parents take a constructive view of improving teaching; parents advocate for better support and training including mentoring.  Eighty-eight percent want smaller classes, and 81 percent would like to see more community, neighborhood-hub schools that include health services and community services right at school.  Eighty percent  would like to see high-quality preschool for all three and four year olds.

Parents demonstrate wide consensus about what needs to happen to improve opportunities for their own and other people’s children.  But that consensus has not been transformed into the political will to challenge growing residential segregation by economics and race. Neither has political leadership surfaced to challenge the anti-tax, austerity budgeting across the states and in Congress that is denying to public schools precisely the services parents say they want.  How to make that happen is the question for our times.