Author Angela Engel says standardized tests only serve to widen the divide between students of means and those who are lacking resources.
When I was a little girl I believed that a fat bearded man climbed down my chimney and delivered my dreams wrapped in red and green paper under our family Christmas tree. When I was grown and knew the truth, I passed the belief to my young daughters because it is tradition and because hope is a beautiful thing.
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High-stakes standardized tests are a lot like Santa. We think we have a magical way to deliver intelligence and responsibility – like the myth, “If you are good, you get presents.” Kids today are taught to believe “if you color in the right bubbles, you get something, like a college education followed by a high paying job.” Some lies are as harmless as a tooth fairy. But other lies have the power to wound.
For the parent who does not have the means to wrap their child’s hope in shiny ribbons and place them neatly underneath an ornamented tree, the tale of Christmas can be a curse. For the little girl who wakes up on Dec. 25 to discover that all the toys in the stores and television miracles were delivered to other children, Santa is a bitter disappointment. It is a torment for the little boy who wakes up Christmas morning to an empty refrigerator and wonders if it happened because he is a bad boy.
How well a child scores on a standardized test is correlated to their parent’s income, not the size of their brain, nor the quality of their school. Like the story of Santa, millions of parents perpetuate this lie because, however false, test scores feel like a badge of achievement. The Pearson or McGraw Hill label of “above proficient” or “proficient” simply makes them feel good. It’s hard to challenge the things that make us feel good, even if those same things are an injustice to others.
On June 1, 1999, the U.S. Department of Education agreed with Debra Gaudette after the Connecticut State Department of Education refused to provide her daughter’s test answers on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT). The Department of Education ruled that the Connecticut State Department of Education violated Gaudette’s parental rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in denying her access to the test information.
When his daughter was denied her diploma, Martin Swaden of Edina, Minn., asked to see his daughter’s answers from the test used to determine who graduates from high school. Initially, the state refused his request but Swaden, an attorney, persisted by threatening to sue the school district. When finally given the test and his daughter’s answer sheet, Swaden sat in a room with state officials and found his daughter had correctly answered six questions that the National Computer Systems, NCS, had scored wrong. Had NCS scored her correctly it would have been enough to raise her above the score required for graduation. When it was all over, the state determined that errors by NCS had caused 47,000 Minnesota students to get lower scores than they deserved, 8,000 to fail when they should have passed, and 525 seniors to be unjustly denied diplomas.
Errors in standardized tests are common and far less rampant than recognized because test publishers like Pearson and McGraw Hill operate privately without public accountability or education oversight. An independent audit of the Florida FCAT identified an error in 2006 Third Grade Reading Test described as an “accidental misplacement of ‘anchor’ questions.” The FCAT is used as the measure to retain thousands of Florida third-graders.
This year Elizabeth Phillips, principal of PS 321 in New York City, wrote a letter to John B. King Jr., education commissioner of New York State, expressing concern over flawed test questions that included an eighth grade language test featuring a talking pineapple with no correct answers.
“The idea that teachers may lose their jobs and schools may be closed based on how children do on these problematic exams is incredibly upsetting and demoralizing to educators…I hope that you will consider recommending to the State Legislature that given the flaws in the tests, we are not yet ready to use them for high stakes decision making,” according to an article on Care2.com.
These multiple choice tests are used every day to make high stakes decisions in student placement and retention, whether a teacher keeps their job or gets a raise, and which schools stay open and which schools close. It is no mistake that every “turnaround” school has served low-income and minority children. This model of standardization and high-stakes testing has perpetuated education inequities. Children of lower-income families have traded teachers, art, music, computers, after-school programs, counselors, athletics, and prevention services for Scantron test sheets. Their wealthy counterparts in higher-income areas learn Chinese, violin and how to access information globally.
High-stakes tests have thus served to widen both the achievement gap and the opportunity gap between the rich and the poor. Under this feigned banner of “accountability” America’s growing caste system has once again been legitimized; teaching white wealthy children to think smarter and poor colored children to work harder. High-stakes standardized tests are a lie. A lie, similar to the North Pole tale, that rewards high income children and denies low income children of the most important gift: a meaningful education.
About the author
Angela Engel is the author of the book, Seeds of Tomorrow: Solutions for Improving our Children’s Education and the director of Uniting4Kids, a non-profit promoting quality neighborhood schools through parent, teacher and student leadership.
I do not think anyone said that standardized tests were going to get rid of achievment gaps or increase student achievement. It is like me blaming my scale if I gain pounds when I was hoping to lose them. We need assessments that are accurate, timely, fair, and specific. That’s what we need to focus on versus getting rid of them.
Mark,
I don’t think that’s the simile that appropriately describes Ms. Engel’s argument. It might be more accurate to say that it is like a scale that tells slender people who stand on it that they weigh less than they do and obese people that they weigh more than they do. Her argument is that you would toss out that scale and get another rather than crash dieting to get the scale to lie to you in a way that makes you feel better rather than worse.
Actually, we need for every child to have at least three healthy meals every day; a stable, warm and safe place to sleep every night; access to health, dental and mental health care; for their parent(s) to have a living wage and access to affordable housing…
…then we can start talking about “gaps.”
And this list is the BARE minimum.
Sorry Adam, I don’t buy it. The scale tells people the same thing. If the test is not valid, it is not valid for all test takers. TCAP, for the most part, can accurately reflect what a student knows and is able to do. There is no perfect exam. The key for people who use the scale and students who take TCAP, is what we do with the information. If we continue to only use TCAP results as a way to show differences instead of responding to the differences, then we won’t increase student achievement.
Andrea,
I have given a lot of thought to how school becomes an important piece of getting ahold of and making progress on the complex of problems you list. I believe it has to be a pull ourselves up by the boot straps sort of process because starting with equity in food, housing and health before equity and quality in schools faces the same kinds of problems as starting the other way around. I think we need parallel, intertwined, mutually reinforcing processes.
In my opinion, the Greyston Foundation (http://www.greyston.org/) has a pretty compelling model that could get started with educating kids as easily as it got started employing homeless people. I’d be curious to hear what others think and if anyone else sees the connections and the potential I see.
At DGS, we are working with two ideas – Education for Sustainability and teaching up. The first exposes kids to the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary to understand the world in new and generative ways. The second empowers them to share their emerging abilities and understandings with older people, including adults.
This is, of course, not THE solution but I firmly believe it will supporte a more general solution. If everyone would attend to the piece of the puzzle they have in front of them, we could get them to fit together.
And we need to face the fact that there is not a shortage of food or of housing, just a shortage of good thinking about how to connect those things with the people who need them. It is really a question of economics – how do we allocate finite resources to meet needs and potentially unlimited desires?
Unfortunately, we have essentially eliminated effective education on that subject from the K-12 experience for the majority of individuals. How do we really expect society to solve these kinds of problems when we know that in general they lack the basic conceptual tools needed for the job? (I want to emphasize that I am not talking about financial literacy. Money is one way to facilitate exchange but by no means the only and in some cases, probably not the best way. I’m talking about economics in the broadest sense possible.)
And to bring this around to the actual topic of the article, I don’t see large-scale and/or high-stakes standardized testing as an important or even a particularly useful part of the solution and further I believe that such testing does in fact do damage that tends to perpetuate the problem rather than to solve it. I believe we need accountability. I do not believe the current system provides it in a way that moves us in the direction of solutions.
There are two arguments at play here. One is that we need better assessments – that’s true enough, and hardly a problem with education alone. Lots of assessments are subject to errors (Type I or Type II) — including most medical tests for cancer, viruses and disease. We can all agree that we need to improve assessments depending on the type of information we want. The TCAP is a pretty blunt instrument, and it is more useful the larger the base: most helpful for school or districts (which is what it is designed for), less helpful for any specific child.
But the notion that because an assessment lacks precision for a small data set, or that it has errors and thus should be eliminated is flat-out nuts — medical tests routinely give false positives and negatives (so people are told they might have a disease when they don’t, and some think they don’t have it when they do). We use medical tests with a wide range of errors every day, but we don’t argue to eliminate these tests, we argue to start with very broad ones applied over a large population, and get more specific data if we think there is an issue. Such is true with most standardized testing in education.
And Ms. Engel presents this as an issue disproportionally affecting poor families when the opposite is true: for years we pretended that the schools to which most low-income children were assigned were just as good as ones to which their wealthier peers attended. Standardized tests are often the primary evidence that has shown this not to be true, and it is this data that is presented in arguments (e.g. Lobato and the School Finance Bill) to show that we need to assign resources differently, and do a better (and often different) job with . THe idea that we would eliminate any standardized measurement across a wide number of schools and kids is to return to a system that lacks any transparency, and would harm the kids that need the most help.
This is a great article and the last paragraph is one of the best things I have read about the state of education in a long time. As a white kid growing up in mostly black schools in the era after the civil rights movement I feel that I have been the beneficiary so often of the legacy of the civil rights movement. It saddens me to see that we are returning to a very unequal and very segregated system of education, not that it ever got close to equal. It seems that the money that goes directly to for profit businesses that make these tests would be much better spent on addressing the issues that Andrea brings up. I am truly feeling a little hope on this issue, there is a rebellion afoot against this nonsense in every part of the country.
It is absolutely not true that we have acted as if poor schools were equal to rich ones and that standardized testing shined the light on this. You can simply look at the facilities and the surrounding neighborhoods of a rich and a poor school and know that there are differences. Johnathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities was published in 1991 and discussed the vast differences between rich and poor schools that persist today. It was obvious to me as a high schooler that the property tax system of distribution absolutely exacerbates inequalities as school districts seem to be set up along racial and class lines, a great example being DPS and Cherry Creek. Standardized tests have largely been used to justify giving a type of education to poor and minority students that is vastly different in curriculum to that being received in wealthy suburban districts. Students in poverty need access to the same rich elective programing that exists in suburban districts so that poor students can find what they love(is this word allowed in education discussions anymore?) and have a reason to stay in school and pursue an education. Unfortunately in far to many urban schools the students get test prep and less opportunities to explore their passions.
Jesse, explain to me how eliminating a system of measurement that shows the impact of inequality will make things more equal? Because you want it to be so?
Alex if we want to make things more equal, or equitable, then that is what should be done. We make sure that poor kids have access to everything that wealthy kids have. Meaning food on the table, small class sizes, quality health care, jobs that pay a living wage, exactly what Andrea said above. These tests have done zero to reduce inequity and in many cases make it worse. Test based school “reform” has led to absolute chaos in poor communities with closings all over the country. It has allowed people to take money directly from the public system and put into their pockets at the expense of kids. It seeks to demonize teachers as people who don’t believe in their students while at the same time implying that a few families that have more wealth than all of the kids in our poorest schools combined care more. These tests aren’t a simple diagnostic. They have and continue to have political consequences.
Jesse, you are arguing that there is no point in having a standard system to measure schools until we solve poverty, which has eluded every society regardless of type since the beginning of recorded time. Don’t you think that is a little much?
And why stop there? Why not stop measuring health as well? There is a correlation between heath and poverty, should we stop giving kids annual physicals because low-income communities have different outcomes than affluent communities?
There is a fatalism to your argument that I find even more depressing than the argument itself.
Alex your metaphor only makes sense if doctors are fired and hospitals shut down based on the results. What I find depressing is that your side profits of segregating our schools and is engaged in a war on the poor and claiming it to be some altruistic civil rights battle. Lets be honest the bankers and stock brokers involved in Ed reform are newcomers to the social justice discussions and they come to the table with highly arrogant and wrong arguements and motives that are suspect. We have a solution to poverty, a country that can kill innocent people in Pakistan from unmanned drones can solve poverty, but we are engaged in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. We manufacture an educational crisis as a means to privatize and profit over what was once a public good.
Alex,
Let’s unpack your metaphor a little more. Can we agree that the nature of the results we get from TCAP type testing are roughly similar to the vital statistics a doctor would collect with a battery of medical assessments? The big question might be something like – what level of basic functionality does the individual have. Neither data set has any real diagnostic power.
So, let’s say there are two approaches to collecting vital statistics. One is radically invasive, time consuming and expensive to conduct. The other is simple, quick and painless and could be conducted by a well trained technician rather than a highly trained doctor. Which battery of medical assessments should we choose?
8th Grade TCAP takes 12.5 hours of testing time to administer completely, over 18 hours for students who get the extended time accommodation. I think it’s hard for people who don’t spend their days in schools to imagine just how disruptive that is, not only due to the actual administration of the assessment, but because of the preparation and cleanup. It is totally insane how much time and effort goes into just making it all run. The price of the test does not even begin to account for the full cost of this accountability system.
And for all of that we get what? A “blunt instrument” that’s good for district level decisions but not individual decisions. That is so totally backwards that it makes my head spin. The highest level decision making should be the least intrusive in the daily lives of people inhabiting the system. The vast majority of time should be spent on the things that make classes go day-to-day (like short cycle data tracking/progress monitoring) instead of getting bogged down in something that has very little direct benefit to students and teachers.
To say that we have to have some assessments and they just need to get better is to miss the point that we have a fundamental structural problem in accountability, not one that will be solved by revising tests.
The current testing regime “shines a light” on inequality because of they way we use and talk about the data, not because it has anything inherently more effective at exposing inequality. As has been pointed out, the problems have been evident for a very long time and the data have existed to drive these conversations if people had really wanted to have them.
If you want to shine a light on something, let’s study and publish a full cost accounting of what we’re doing and link that to the benefit we get. I predict people would be appalled if we actually applied some business practice here.
Jesse, doctors lose their jobs for performance all the time (they also get sued for malpractice). Doctors don’t receive tenure after 2 years, undergo strict and rigorous professional and peer review, regularly report statistics on their patients and treatments (which usually are not adjusted for demographic factors), are ranked on on all sorts of factors. Every day I drive by a billboard for a hospital that proudly says “ranked #1 respiratory hospital in Colorado” and I see popular magazine covers that detail surveys on best doctors by practice. You think that education has more strict measurements than medicine?
And I don’t know where else to go. Every topic we discuss seems to end up with your depiction of a vast corporate conspiracy with mysterious profiteers who apparently spend their free hours when not trying to enslave teachers operating unmanned drones in foreign countries. So I think this is well past the point of productive dialogue for either of us here and probably in the future.
Jeff, there is a longer response here, but let’s do it over a beer. I’ll buy.
Alex you can twist my words all you want and not talk to me anymore that’s fine but two things.
1. My arguement about drones is that if we have money for this we have money to eliminate poverty.
2. It is not a mystery conspiracy the privatization agenda is out in public, here are examples
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2013/03/amplify_insight_wins_contract_from_common_core_testing_consortium.html
\http://www.economist.com/node/21558255
The economist article straight up calls it privatization. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories as my life experience is that small groups can’t keep secrets much less giant groups. But if you want to portay me as a wingnut that’s fine. I’ll be crazy just like Cornel West and others who call out the reality of privatization.
This article has so many lies in it that I don’t know where to begin. Why is Angela Engel??
Guess how well TCAP affects my instruction? None. Any good teacher knows their student’s strengths and weaknesses far before we get the results back.
Guess how much time I have to spend on TCAP prep? It’s a waste of resources.
Alexander Oom’s contention that schools with high concentrations of poor students were widely regarded as being equal to those schools with high concentrations of wealthy students is a falsehood or Mr. Ooms is misinformed or he failed to do the appropriate research. Teachers’ unions, for example, that Mr. Ooms and other members of the “education reform” movement frequently criticize as defenders of the status quo, have for decades pointed out that poor students schools perform below those of their rich peers. In their zeal to promote high stakes standardized testing, these so-called reformers ignore the stress of those tests on poor children just as they ignore the effects of poverty of those students most in need. If there is pretense it is to ignore valid studies such as the 1966 Coleman Report that stated clearly that poverty is more of a factor in the life of a poor child than a classroom teacher. And, before you retort, Mr. Ooms, prove that the Coleman Report is false. What study has superseded it?
Albert – Great news. You were not supposed to be spending any time on TCAP prep anyway. Those things called “the standards?” Yeah. Teach and get your paycheck and benefits.
So many of the diverse opinions in this post are correct. Poverty does impact a child’s ability to focus. Testing does prove a child’s ability to read, write and calculate. And yes, these tests are stressful for students and staff.
As an expeditionary art teacher who takes low income students of color to theaters, museums and galleries every week, I am working the serenity prayer as it applies to my ability to keep this job that I love. While others may have the courage to change the testing landscape, I accept that this is the reality within which my students and I function.
As an example of ways to still teach expeditionary and studio art and prepare my English language learners for the high stakes exams, my Do Nows and assessments are evolving to include the concept of art in the wording of the tests.
A Do Now example: There are 17 artists in this Art Intensive. Each artist must complete five designs within the eight hours of studio time we will have before our production deadline. How much time will each artist have for each design?
A Post Expedition Assessment: Was your emotional reaction to Georgia O’Keefe’s exhibition greater to, less than or equal to Hector’s murals on Santa Fe? Explain your answer using the lines below. Use the space provided to sketch the composition of one of the paintings or murals that elicited your strongest emotional response.
I love going to museums, galleries and theaters with these students. I love spending time in the studio helping them make art. If I can help them understand the language of the tests while developing their love of art and design, my students and I win. Our school stays open, they continue to get to go on these expeditions, and I keep my job as an expeditionary art teacher. I don’t think it is a waste of my resources to reword my assessments in a way that helps them learn how to succeed with these mandated tests.
Sam Grant, I’m going to assume you’re not a teacher, because you entirely missed the point of what Albert was saying. He’s saying that we test in March, but don’t get the results of the test until August, long after those kids have left our classes.
But that’s because the real reason behind these tests is to provide the baseball bat we use to bludgeon poor schools with, their students and their teachers.
“It is no mistake that every “turnaround” school has served low-income and minority children.”
In fact, I’ll just ask my annoying question again, the one no one seems able, or willing, to answer: Can Alex, or anyone, point out to me even one low performing or turnaround affluent school? Just one will do. The reformers’ contention that these tests have some sort of value beyond identifying socioeconomic status would surely lead us to believe that there are indeed low-performing high income schools. Yet we never hear about those. So, once again, I’m waiting to hear about that affluent, failing school. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting. If there are indeed no low performing affluent schools, it sort of proves the point that all they measure is SES, a neat little piece of logic that somehow gets overlooked.
“Jesse, you are arguing that there is no point in having a standard system to measure schools until we solve poverty, which has eluded every society regardless of type since the beginning of recorded time. Don’t you think that is a little much?”
Well excuse me, but don’t YOU think it’s a little much, Alex, that we grade schools of unequal means and opportunities with the same instrument, then punish the schools who are dealing with the worst problems of poverty, with all the fallout of that condition? When we see consistently that all the low scoring schools are schools in poverty, why does it make sense to you guys that the problem is so obviously the TEACHERS? Not the hungry bellies, the lack of hot water at home, the electricity that gets turned off, like clockwork, every month, dad (and sometimes mom) in prison, the attending of five schools in nine months, entering school with ZERO English proficiency, entering school, if an English speaker, with a mere 300 word vocabulary, lack of medical and dental care…..but the deformers decide it’s the TEACHERS.
But we know why, don’t we? When an MBA hedge fund manager, on this site or a national one, is SO INTERESTED in “reforming” education, it’s because we smell money, isn’t it? This is not a group that is known for its altruism. Anyone who believes that a bunch of MBAs, bankers, etc., care more about kids than the people who actually work with kids, spend their money on kids, and spend their off time planning for kids, all for VERY LOW PAY, then that’s some pretty twisted logic.
And Jesse, I think you’re right. I think the public is beginning to catch wind of this, but I think that wasn’t supposed to happen. The mainstream media is owned by Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch–have you noticed that mainstream outlets, like 9 news and 7 news, didn’t even report on the Centennial school closing? The mainstream media is 100% complicit in this, and people really haven’t known what’s going on. I think that may be changing. I hope so.
Great article, Angela. Thanks. We need to continue to raise our voices, loud and clear. And don’t forget to talk to the families you serve about what’s really going on. It really opens their eyes. We need to help the lower class get MAD.
sam Grant,
You completely missed the point in your haste to be snarky. But you’re right in the fact that I do teach just for the 40k paycheck and mediocre overpriced Kaiser sick-care. Psych!
I’ve been reading this a similar conversations with interest, and I have a concern I have not seen discussed much, and I wonder if this is only my perception, or if others have noticed the same, or better yet, has anyone researched this. Allow me to explain:
My central concern is not the assessments themselves, but the pedagogy that results, or the way educators, administrators in particular, respond to the data resulting from the assessments. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I would like to divide these pedagogical approaches into three broad categories, and explain my perceptions and concerns. Feedback would be appreciated.
1) Those who teach to the standards.
2) Those who teach to the tests.
3) Those who reject both.
About 1) In my search of district and school websites I have detected a pattern. This is not scientific, but I have repeatedly noticed that schools in areas of relative affluence (where a relatively high percentage of students score proficient or advanced) tend to focus on curriculum, instruction, and climate in order to maintain or raise academic achievement. Rather than teaching directly to the test, these schools seem to operate under the assumption that a quality education that focuses on standards will result in high academic achievement. After all, the assessments are designed to align with those standards. This approach is often compatible with a strengths-based model.
About 2) In contrast, many schools in areas of relative poverty often take a different approach. Under pressure to raise test scores, such schools are implementing various interventions designed specifically to raise test scores, and data-driven instruction means analyzing test items and implementing interventions specifically to raise achievement in areas where a majority of the students are deficient. This is a deficit model that fragments and robs time from would-be quality curriculum (note my bias here).
A few words about the above admitted generalizations: I have noticed that many charter schools appear to take the first approach regardless of whether they are serving students living in poverty or relative wealth. Some are expeditionary, some use the core knowledge curriculum…but they tend to have a specific approach as opposed to saying simply that they are “data-driven.” I wonder if some of these charters were created specifically to provide an alternative to approach number two described above.
About 3) Forget the assessments, forget the standards, and radically personalize education to meet the needs of individuals and to help them grow their strengths and talents regardless of what the state or anybody else thinks. Few schools take this approach, but there are some. Programs for the gifted and talented can probably afford to take this approach. Lots of home schoolers fit this category.
My point, though, is this: It seems that because of pressure to maintain or raise performance as measured by state assessments, students in affluent areas tend to experience quality curriculum, while far too many students in poverty are experiencing “teaching to the test” at its worst. And more often than not this “teaching to the test” approach is ineffective because it ignores brain science and tends to be delivered in a fragmented and random way. Students don’t connect; skills and knowledge don’t stick. Achievement and growth data too often remain flat while the quality of education suffers and students are denied access to programs that would build on their strengths because they are double and triple timing in math and literacy interventions.
Thus, it could be argued that high stakes testing is exacerbating the divide between those who experience quality education based on sound pedagogy while those in areas of poverty more often experience questionable schooling practices due to educators’ misguided attempts at raising scores rather than improving curriculum and instruction.
Am I wrong?
I will let someone in the trenches speak for me today. She wrote me this morning. How timely to share with you. One MEANS of measuring as a rather unintelligent approach to program progress is the point here:
“I am principal of a small school for at-risk rural elementary children. In 2009-10 we were in danger of closing due to low test scores, even though we are doing an amazing job with these students. We were given one year to operate — with a threat to improve or else. In 2010-11 an outside team from the east coast came and reviewed our school and wrote a GLOWING report so we were given two years. (Ridiculous, unfair, etc. “Normal” is 3 or 5 years.) That brings us to this year. We were just told we have one year — with a bigger threat than ever. Even though we have improved since the review team they said it is not enough. They will look at our test scores on this spring’s Performance Series computerized test, the fall state-run MEAP test and the winter Performance Series and make a decision to stay open or close. I have been principal for five years and we have improved every year but these are academically low children and this is a tough path. We don’t kick out or give up on children. Our children have traumatic backgrounds — and sometimes current trauma. Many are homeless, most are single parent households, nearly all are in poverty, many raised by grandparents, etc.”
[End of quote.]