Most state education departments strongly rely on reading, writing, and math scores on standardized competency or achievement tests to evaluate their elementary and secondary schools. State officials make concerted efforts to get their schools to improve their scores.
New Jersey mandates achievement tests at nearly every grade after the second, orders remediation for those who fall below cut-off scores, and requires ninth-graders to take a High School Proficiency Test (HSPT), which they must pass to graduate.
To help schools prepare pupils for the HSPT, the state specifies the achievement-test scores that mark satisfactory progress for third and sixth graders. And to spur the schools on, the state releases the HSPT scores, as well as the third- and sixth-grade scores, to the press, pressuring local school districts to produce better scores than others or face public censure.
Is this emphasis on testing a good thing? It might seem so. Testing seems to hold schools accountable and to stimulate educational improvement. But a number of educators have expressed deep reservations.
Standardized tests assess only limited kinds of thinking. Because they are timed and follow a multiple choice format, they reward the quick detection of right answers, but they discourage deep thought. Students are often told that because they have many questions to answer, they should avoid getting caught up in any one problem--even though the tendency to become absorbed by a problem characterizes the most productive minds.
Standardized tests also discourage students from looking at problems from different perspectives. Teachers frequently report that their most imaginative and thoughtful students bristle at the assumption that there is a single right answer and think about ways in which supposedly wrong answers might be true. These students must be reminded to be more simple-minded for the sake of the test.
The test taking itself, of course, occurs only a few days a year. But the tests exert strong effects on the overall curriculum.
To prepare students for the tests, schools devote large amounts of time to teaching the three R's through textbooks and workbooks that also follow multiple-choice (or fill-in-the-blank) formats. Schools have little time for more active and creative modes of learning--drawing, building, performing, role playing, participating in discussions, carrying out projects and experiments.
Testing advocates argue that today's schools must give priority to basic concepts and skills; activities such as art and discussion groups must be secondary. But the developmental and educational theories of Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and others suggest that students can often learn basic concepts, and learn them most energetically and soundly, through such active endeavors.
Students can learn a good deal of math through carpentry projects. And while they often find the math in textbooks abstract and tedious, they enthusiastically tackle the math that's required to build things, for it helps them fulfill their creative impulses.
Many teachers feel that finding ways of introducing concepts and skills through creative activities is an exciting challenge. Unfortunately, projects take time and involve work that is unrelated to standardized tests. Textbooks and workbooks enable teachers to cover test-related material much more efficiently. So schools opt for the texts and workbooks, even though students rarely display any enthusiasm for them.
A similar problem occurs with respect to reading and writing. Children can often learn to read and write through personally meaningful activities--writing letters to friends, creating picture books and newspapers. Children do not, of course, always need to be active; they also can acquire a love of reading through exposure to good books--those that touch them in meaningful ways.
Today's test-driven education, however, commonly adopts pre-packaged programs of readers and workbooks that teach isolated skills such as vowels and prefixes in a step-by-step fashion. These packages enable the teacher to monitor the child's progress and to provide additional exercises when the child experiences difficulty. The teacher always knows where the child stands with respect to testable skills.
Unfortunately, as frank Smith has vividly described in his recent book "Insult to Intelligence," most of the stories and exercises in these packages are simple-minded and dull. They micht prepare students for standardized tests, but they don't inspire a love of reading.
Standardized tests affect children in other ways. Although youngsters naturally learn at different rates, the tests measure them all by the same yardsticks. As a result, large proportions of students receive labels such as "below grade level," "in need of remediation," and "deficient in the following areas." These labels can hurt a child's confidence and self-esteem, and the remedial education of the child "with deficiencies" becomes even more dominated by tedious exercises and drills.
If, in addition, the tests that generate these labels are in any way biased against the economically disadvantaged, the social implications are profound.
Despite these and other problems, standardized tests do provide a method of evaluating education, and they seem to be here to stay.
What, then, can be done? We need tests that re socially fair, but we also need evaluations that go well beyond the test scores and address questions such as: Do the children in this school love to learn? Are they actively involved? Do they approach problems with confidence? Do they stick with problems, even when they get wrong answers? Are they developing all their capacities--not only their conceptual skills but their sense and creative powers as well?
These questions are not necessarily easy to answer. Compared to the questions that testers usually ask, questions about children's love of learning, self-confidence, and creativity do not lend themselves to precise measurement. But these questions are no less vital to the education of the child.