Immediate End to Standardized Testing Is Urged

Teachers union leader Albert Shanker called Saturday for an immediate end to multiple-choice standardized achievement testing, saying the results are misleading and may even be hindering school reform.

Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made the suggestion after a speech at the Educational Testing Service’s 50th Invitational Conference in which he said many school districts are apparently shying away from reform ideas for fear that they might drag down standardized test scores.

“I would call for an immediate end to standardized tests as they are now,” Shanker told reporters.

“What you need to do is test for things that are really important: reading, writing, computing, history,” he said. “To test for depth of knowledge, you have to get away from things that are machine-gradeable.”

He suggested that schools should demand, and publishers produce, new tests that measure ability to perform higher-level academic or intellectual tasks, such as writing sensible essays or computing multi-step math problems.

Such tests, he said, might resemble the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, congressionally mandated tests taken periodically by thousands of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds measuring ability to read, write and compute at different levels of sophistication.

Children are being tested far too frequently, Shanker said. He suggested that, if students were tested at five-year intervals, instead of every year or so, educators might feel freer to innovate to better suit individual student needs.

Shanker stressed that he was not “anti-test.” He even cautioned against siding with anti-test groups because the public would conclude that school officials were trying to escape accountability.

But he expressed agreement with many of the test critics’ arguments in his address before 650 educators and testing experts.

He cited, for example, a recent study by Dr. John J. Cannell, the head of an educational watchdog group, showing that 48 states and about 80% of local districts are reporting misleadingly “above average” standardized test scores.