Standardized testing is a topic that has been hotly debated, especially since No Child Left Behind and Common Core Standards have taken some heat for not living up to their expectations. For this particular assignment, I did my best to leave my personal feelings about testing at the door, but having just endured test week at the school at which I will be teaching in the fall, I was definitely less objective than I normally would have been. That being said, I did dive into a decent amount of research and spoke to my mother-in-law about the school in which she teaches in order to try to gain a more well-rounded perspective.
At only 22 years old, I had to take quite a few standardized tests myself throughout my K-12 career, so I am definitely able to sympathize with the kids. Oddly enough, I was that weird kid that always sort of enjoyed the standardized tests. Heck, I was excited to get to take my Praxis Core this spring! I am one of those students for whom standardized tests really capitalizes on my strengths. I know that sounds silly, but I think that is an important perspective that often gets overlooked in this debate. For some students, these tests really do a good job measuring what they set out to measure. Of course, it is just as important (if not more so) to discuss those students who fall through the cracks of standardized testing. My younger brother performs relatively poorly on his high stakes assessments, largely because they are just SO LONG. He had ADHD, and it is a struggle for him to focus. If something is difficult for him, he often freezes up. I once watched him stare at a single math problem for 20 minutes without writing a single thing down. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was thinking. I told him he could always come back to the problem later, but he said he really thought he was close. Ten minutes later, he was still stuck and had made no progress. For students like my brother, standardized testing is an absolute nightmare. Sure, students like him can get extra time. But who really wants extra time added to a four hour test?
Having had my first ever experience on the other side of the test this year as a proctor/administrator at the school where I will be teaching in the fall, I have definitely gained some perspective on the testing. To be completely honest, I had forgotten how interminable the tests were. Kids had to sit silently and test for three to four hours, only getting three minute breaks once an hour. That's an awfully tough environment to force on a third grader. I mean, these kids start taking these tests when they are eight or nine years old! In addition to being reminded how grueling the tests are, I got to hear from a few teachers about their perspective on testing. The sixth grade teacher felt really confident about her students' reading abilities. She said that she had spent some time teaching to the test, but she hadn't felt as boxed in as she thought she might. Math, however, was a different story. She was so nervous for her students about the math test. This year's sixth graders were just not as strong mathematically, and since this was the school's first year having middle school students, the scores really mattered. Of course, since this school is a charter school, things are a little different than they might be in a regular public school, but charter schools in North Carolina are still held to state testing standards. Another teacher at the school told me about her experience as a third grade teacher. She explained how hard it is to prepare students for their first ever high stakes test. At age eight, they don't understand why the test is important. They just hear that they have to take a four hour test, so they kind of shut down. She told me that she felt like she had to teach to the test in ELA more than in math, which I thought was pretty interesting. Overall, I am not really looking forward to having to prepare my students for high stakes tests, and I am hoping for some sort of reform to the testing requirements.
When I spoke with my mother-in-law, she largely echoed what other teachers had been telling me. She teaches at a different charter school in the area, and her school recently added a high school. She explained that it was really difficult to have both middle and high schoolers in the same building during testing because they actually test at different times, and high school students test longer because they have final exams in addition to high stakes exams. That is not something I ever would have thought about. She also told me that teaching to the test has never been her main goal. She finds that getting her students to read more is more helpful than traditional teaching to the test. As an ELA teacher, she has found that performance goes up when students are exposed to literature of multiple types, so she does something called a 40 Book Challenge with her students. Each of them has to read forty books from different genres over the course of the school year. She says it gives great results.
To be completely honest, based on the U.S.'s scores compared to the rest of the world, it really does not seem like all of this testing is paying off. We score at or below average in reading, science, and math, which, based on our expenditure per student (we did research on all of this back in, I think, Module 2), is ridiculous. Based on our spending, we should be scoring up there with the best of them. If anything, our standardized testing is telling us that things are just not working. These tests are stressful for the students, teachers, and school administrators, and they do not seem to be actively improving the state of education (Fast Facts).
At the end of the day, it is important that we send the message to our students that, although standardized tests may be important in our current system, they do not mean everything. My sister-in-law, a ninth grader at a public school in Charlotte, NC, recently took her end of grade assessments, and she felt really down when she saw how low her math score was when compared to her grades in her classes. She felt really disheartened, so I talked with her and reminded her that it was just one test. No matter how important the test, her score does not define her. She should in no way feel any less smart or capable because she did not do as well as she had hoped. It made me so sad that students as young as eight years old had to experience that feeling of disappointment. Schools put so much pressure on kids to succeed, and it really weighs on them (Kamenetz). I definitely can see why some parents opt out of having their kids take the tests. I don't know what I would do if I had kids and had to make that decision. On the one hand, I feel like standardized tests are anxiety-provoking and do not accurately measure ability, but on the other hand, it is kind of what I have always known. Until the system changes, what is a teacher, parent, or student to do?
References:
National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). Fast facts. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1
Kamenetz, Anya. (2015, January 22). The past, present and future of high-stakes testing. Retrieved from
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/01/22/377438689/the-past-present-and-future-of-high-stakes-testing
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