Keeping the Public in Public Education by Rick Salutin

Keeping the Public in Public Education by Rick Salutin

Author:Rick Salutin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00


III. Testing, testing … You’re fired!

If your kid recently soldiered through any of the proliferating number of standardized tests, like Ontario’s EQAO tests in reading, math and science, for Grades 3, 6 and 9, then you’ve been part of a worldwide “homogenization” of education techniques. This kind of testing is meant less to measure how kids are doing, than how their teachers and schools are doing, so that they can be held “accountable.” Now there’s nothing wrong with accountability. And testing is a necessary teaching tool. The problem is accountability based on high-stakes, standardized tests.

Standardized means the same for everybody, set by a central authority – a government department or private company. But kids aren’t the same. A test can tell you what a kid scores, not what the score means for the kid. That depends on where she started from, what his abilities are and what’s important for her to know. A low mark for one kid might be a better sign than a high mark for another of the same age. Teachers know these things and can adjust the lesson (and the mark’s meaning) to the learner. But anonymous test scorers being paid per exam marked, can’t. So standardized tests are poor indicators of how kids and teachers are doing.

It gets worse when you tack the accountability piece onto standardized testing, as they’ve done all over the U.S. It may seem plausible and clear-cut. But when test scores become the basis for rewards and punishments like hiring, firing, teacher pay, and school funding or closing, the tests grow vulnerable to (and even “create an incentive for”) cheating: by getting tests in advance and giving them to kids, gaming the system in ways like shifting pass/fail levels, faking results, or “counselling out” weaker students so the school or class average rises.

All this is documented in U.S. education historian Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She gets credibility because she served as a high official under George W. Bush, bringing in and arguing for the approach. She now says “we were wrong … testing actually makes the schools worse.” Any learning gains made are shaky and can “evaporate” quickly once the testing pressure is off. Learning in a school can even decline because of testing. There’s a technical term for it: Campbell’s Law, proclaimed by U.S. expert in methodology David Campbell. It says if you base accountability on measurements, what you’re measuring may get worse instead of better. It sounds weird but it happens, for instance, if ERs are rated by number of patients treated quickly: they might rush people through rather than provide good care, in order to raise their score. So you’re better off not going there despite its high rank.

The list of objections is almost endless. The saddest come from teachers; many are cited by former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein in his book on accountability. They’re painful to read, the way TV crime dramas about child abuse can be painful to watch.



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