Thinking about the Mandatory Tests Boondoggle

There has been a lot of discussion about the mandatory testing of public school students so that districts can meet the federal No Child Left Untested...oops, the No Child Left Behind mandates. A lot of the discussion is about the testing itself and whether some of these tests actually measure what they say they measure, and whether or not they tell us much about how well schools are teaching students. I have not seen a whole lot of discussion about how much the testing costs and whether the information gotten is worth the money.

Today, I unrolled my Albuquerque Journal (warning: certain articles are available only to subscribers) newspaper and saw this headline on the bottom of the front page: More Mandatory Tests Likely at State High Schools. The story reports that the state is changing the mandatory test schedules for secondary students and that students are likely to be forced to take more tests starting next year. The cost will be a cool $3 million. We know where that money will go-- and it's not to the classrooms of New Mexico.

The story says further that:

• the purpose of the testing is to "help students map out their high school education."
• freshmen would be tested on their readiness to complete high school courses
• sophmores would be tested for college readiness
• juniors would be tested for workplace skills

The part that caught my eye and made me start thinking "boondoggle" was this sentence:

"(Lawmakers) wanted the students--and their teachers--to have a better idea of the students' strengths and weaknesses, and what each student needs to be prepared for college or work."

(Albuquerque Journal, Friday Morning, January 4, 2008, p. A1)

My question is: Do we really need to pay a testing company $3 million to figure this out? Wouldn't it be a lot less expensive and a lot more efficient to make sure that class sizes and teaching loads are such that teachers have the opportunity to get to know their students?

When I was teaching, I often thought that I would gladly forgo a raise in order to have managable class sizes and student numbers, so that I could actually get to know my students and target my teaching to take them from where they were to where they wanted to go. My most successful teaching occured when I could provide small group instruction, targeted to student abilities, in a particular subject. I first experienced this teaching science to a small group of 'scientifically and mathmatically challenged' students at a private school. I had 14 students in the class and got to know them very well. By giving a sample final exam at the beginning of class, and working with the students individually, I was able to help each student develop a goal for the course and a plan to accomplish it. I taught the students to use quizzes and tests to determine their own strengths and weaknesses (they were prone to wadding them up and throwing them away) and advised them on different ways to capitalize on the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses. That class achieved between 85% and 90% mastery of the material they set out to learn: Newton's Laws, setting up and solving physics problems using math, and developing and testing questions using the scientific method. As a bonus, many of them discovered that they actually enjoyed science and they learned metacognitive (thinking about their own learning) skills useful for future academic situations. I successfully used these same methods again in teaching two high school summer school classes for students who had earned D's and F's in physical science, and also when teaching a gifted pull-out program for elementary students.

When we go to teach students any subject, we want them to learn the content of the field and the skills necessary to do something with it. For physics, the content would be the scientific method, physical laws, history of discovery of these laws, and how they have been used to obtain new knowledge about the world. In this field we teach skills such as how to ask a question physically, how to parse a word problem, how to use equations to solve problems, how to design a simple experiment, how to analyze data, and how to clearly and understandably communicate results. The content is not always transferable to other fields, but the skills are. And many of these skills, when considered broadly, are useful for either college or the workplace. In fact, they are useful for life. And when we talk about various levels of "readiness," we are really discussing how well students use content knowledge and skills broadly in life.

Standardized tests may not be all that useful for answering questions about student readiness. Firstly, they are a snapshot of what a student does on a particular day. Secondly, students are not all that invested in doing well on tests that have little to do with their own interests, and for which the results do not impact them immediately or directly. And most important, standardized tests cannot factor in student interests and passions that are so necessary to their decisions to learn something. The tests are rather sterile and impersonal, and because of test security, the actual questions cannot be revealed, so all the teachers and counselors get are numbers and percentiles. These numbers alone have limited usefulness, even when the test has high validity, and many of the tests have questionable validity. (Test validity means that it accurately measures what it says it measures).

On the other hand, the teaching methods I described above are nothing new or original. They have been in use since Socrates mentored disciples of the School of Athens. They do not require expensive specialized training to use, and the methods can be used with any materials. What teachers need in order to foster a desire for learning is more subtle. They need time. Time to develop a relationship with each student, in order to discover passions, strengths and weaknesses. Time to talk to students and help them develop goals, a plan, and ways of capitalizing on strengths and minimizing weaknesses. Time to ponder about problems that students have with specific skills and ways to solve them. Time to deal with backtracks and twists and turns in the path of learning. Good teaching is an art. Much of the skill of teaching lies in the art of human interaction, motivation, and in the joy of getting to know students individually.

Standardized tests, while useful for limited purposes, are often presented as a quick-fix to problems. "Oh, we have a low high school graduation rate? Let's give some expensive tests and that will solve all of our problems." But tests only give us information. They do not, in themselves, constitute solutions to problems. In many cases, the information tests give us can be better gotten by the professional judgement of teachers who have time to find out about their students. Of course, that takes more time and requires a certain human touch. The results are often more qualitative than quantitative. But human beings, with all their uniqueness, their passions, and their personal foilables cannot be summed up by numbers alone.

I am so glad that my child is not being forced to take tests in order to enrich the testing companies so that the state legistlature can claim they are doing something about a problem. The joy of homeschooling includes the joy of developing a real relationship with my son, learning his passions, his frustrations, and his uniqueness. So on the level of my son's education, what the state does about mandatory testing in the public schools is unimportant.

But as a taxpayer, I would rather see the $3 million being spent to reduce class sizes, to reduce the amount of paper work teachers do, and to increase time spent developing an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each student. The research shows that a personal relationship between students and their teachers has a positive effect on student achievement.