The New York Department of Education's pilot program to test kindergartners sums up everything that is wrong with public school reform in this nation.
Ever since No Child Left Behind left behind other ways to assess student learning beyond multiple-choice tests, the federal and state governments have gone giddy over standardized testing. And now it has reached a new low testing kindergartners, some of whom are four-years-old.
What are those in charge of educating children thinking when they come up with such ideas? Where is the parent outrage over such a misguided plan? Thank goodness only 10 percent of the elementary school principals have volunteered their students as guinea pigs for this experiment.
Ranging in age from four to six, there are huge developmental differences among kindergartners making the reliability of any form of testing dubious. Some youngsters can already read, while others struggle holding a pencil. North Carolina discovered the uselessness of such an endeavor and aborted testing kindergartners 20 years ago.
We are a nation of numbers. Is the stock market up? Are mortgage rates down? Which presidential candidate is leading in the polls? Give us a score, tell us who won and lost. And truly this is what politicians have put all their reform efforts behind: a numbers game.
The current craze of standardized testing is just another example of how we Americans want quick fixes and simple solutions. Politicians have fed right into the numbers mentality of Americans and Americans have swallowed it whole. No wonder that former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich refers to schools today as "test-taking factories."
By controlling classroom curriculum through testing, politicians have forced schools to spend an inordinate amount of classroom time on test preparation. The effort it is taking to train teachers in how to develop test prep lessons, pulling them out of the classroom (leaving students in the hands of substitutes), and the time to actually administer the tests, is wreaking a mighty blow to the skimpy 180 days of instructional time, leaving less time for teachers to do their job-teach.
Testing and test results dominate faculty meeting agendas and staff development sessions. And people who look at testing as a sign of reform have it backwards. Testing is actually extinguishing creativity, stifling real reform from taking place.
Many schools have immersed their schedules with test prep classes, special tutoring, even reserving Fridays to have students take practice tests. The forbidden "teaching to the test" is actually being encouraged by principals.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that states "will spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to develop, score and report NCLB-required tests."
Just what was this money spent on before?
As a parent, I want the most highly qualified instructors teaching to my children. As a teacher, I want to be treated professionally so that I can meet the needs of parents and their children.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the weight of the final grade in a class? Does all that day-in and day-out work of the student not count towards anything anymore?
The fact of the matter is that an accountability system is and has been already in place-it's called student work. It doesn't have a catchy name. One can't make an easy acronym out of it, and no politician can claim credit for it. Students learn significantly more from assignments that demand students to use higher-level thinking skills - assignments that go beyond the rote type of learning assessed on standardized tests.
Public education went 150 years without excessive standardized testing and guess what happened? It became the world's superpower.
BY Brian Crosby
Brian Crosby, a National Board Certified Teacher, is a 20-year veteran high school English teacher, co-chair of the English Department at Hoover High School in Glendale, California, and author of the just published Smart Kids Bad Schools: 38 Ways to Save America’s Future (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) as well as The $100,000 Teacher: A Teacher’s Solution to America’s Declining Public School System (Capital Books, 2002) which was awarded ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year in Education.