Testing Alone Makes No One Accountable
The anxiety and boredom of Stanford 9 testing are finally over and the business of education has resumed. But the Stanford 9 will come back to haunt the Los Angeles Unified School District when the scores are plastered throughout newspapers and all over the Internet and teachers and administrators face the humiliating task of justifying their school performance.
In the name of accountability, California has mandated that all students in grades 2 through 11 take standardized tests to measure achievement. The Stanford 9, however, is not a reliable measure of achievement and as such does not guarantee accountability. It can’t determine which teachers are doing a good job because it doesn’t relate to what is taught or should be taught in the classroom.
The Stanford 9 test does not correlate to the state curriculum for any grade level, and neither is the test content developmentally appropriate. Questions are asked about historical concepts that are completely out of the realm of the children’s experience and unrelated to the subject matter they study. Math word problems contain vocabulary the children are unable to read.
To add to the testing mania, LAUSD, so concerned with not appearing too lax when it comes to standards, has extended the state’s programs to include first-graders. Now 6-year-olds, some barely able to hold their pencils correctly, are expected to fill in tiny ovals on answer sheets.
Elementary school students aren’t ready to sit more than 20 minutes at a stretch, yet testing sessions can last for as long as an hour. Even though the teachers tell them to relax and that the testing will not affect the grades on their report cards, the children complain of upset stomachs and headaches. “It’s too hard,” they say. “Can we stop now?” But the teachers have to push ahead. The schedules for standardized testing are set in stone.
In addition, the state also now requires that students with disabilities be part of the testing program. Accommodations are provided as necessary, but students taking the test with these accommodations--extended times or in a small group setting, for example--receive only a raw score that is not factored into their school’s results. What sense is there in taking a test and not getting a score, except as an exercise in futility?
Cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional, and child abuse is against the law, but teachers have to do standardized testing.
What is the purpose? It takes many hours to train teachers in test proctoring and more than two weeks to administer the examination, time away from classroom instruction. The Stanford 9 proves only that some children do not score as well as others. As the students would say, “No, duh!”
Why do we do this expensive testing if the human costs also are great? Is it political? In election years, politicians need an issue like teacher accountability so they can jump on the bandwagon. Education issues are always good for a few votes. Or is it property values? A school with high test scores is a selling point for local real estate. Whatever the reason, it is not related to education, and it is time we stopped playing games with our children.
Instead of being given an irrelevant test, children should be pretested on material appropriate for each grade level. Then, at the end of the school year, tests could be administered to measure progress for each child. That’s the real accountability.
It is too late to close the barn door now on testing, but when the scores are released to the public, do not accept the information as gospel. Remember that the results are skewed and are unrelated to the state’s curriculum, textbooks or classroom instruction.
Good teaching takes place in spite of, and not because of, teacher accountability initiatives and arbitrary testing.
