In Chapter 9 of Newman, we get a chance to look at social life from the top down, and look at the structure of institutions such as the educational system that influence our everyday life (Newman, p. 261). Sir Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video in our supplemental material gives us a top-down look at our country’s educational system and why it is structured as it is. A pervasive aspect of that system as we know it is the means by which it is measured: from the top down, standardized testing influences nearly every component of the system. The influence of standardized tests can be seen in the organizations, groups, statuses, role expectations, cultural beliefs and institutionalized norms of this system. You could say that the American educational system runs on standardized tests.
According to Newman,“ the massive structure of the educational system is a reality that determines life chances and choices” (Newman, p. 262). Perhaps no aspect of that system has more impact on those chances and choices than standardized test performance. It is how we evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools, school districts, state education departments, politicians who vote (or don’t vote) for school funding. In addition, with globalization, standardized test performance is how we compare ourselves as a nation to other nations, as exemplified by the chart on Newman, p. 190.
According to Newman, we start testing our school children in kindergarten, and our little kindergartners now spend more time on standardized testing and test preparation than on play.
We continue this testing focus throughout elementary school, middle, school and high school, leading up to the mother of all standardized tests: the college entrance examinations, better known as the SAT and the ACT. It doesn’t stop there, however, as many of us are now acutely aware. To get into many graduate and professional programs, it is not enough “just” to have achieved a good, or even a great undergraduate record. In order to enter the next level of the educational system, you also need to subject yourself, once again, to even more #2 lead pencil and fingerprint and photo ID mass testing experiences such as the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, or some other standardized test, and, of course, achieve an acceptably impressive score.
Preparing our nation’s school children and young adults for standardized tests seems to have become the primary focus of our educational system. As Newman says, it starts in kindergarten. Many of the standardized tests are required by law, either by federal or state governments. The appeal is that standardized tests give us an objective standard that makes comparisons possible at all levels of the system, from nations at the top to students at the bottom. With No Child Left Behind, for example, school quality is judged by students’ performance on standardized tests throughout their education, and graduation, in most cases, now depends on achieving a passing score on one or more state-prescribed testing instruments. The very survival of the schools themselves depends on their students’ performance from year to year on these tests. Schools whose students don’t show adequate yearly progress, measured by (what else?) test scores will be sanctioned, taken over by new leadership, or just closed. Parents study yearly results to decide where to live so their kids can attend good schools. Politicians proclaim success or failure of school funding policies based on standardized test scores. No other measure of the school’s quality comes close to test scores for sorting out the good from the bad.
With so much riding on how well students and schools perform on standardized tests, it is not surprising how much emphasis is placed on preparing for them. School administrators make hard choices to cut back on social studies, foreign languages and the arts in their curricula to make more time for the stuff that “counts” on the tests. Recess gives way to more math and reading time. Band and foreign language become after-school extracurricular activities. Physical education is cut to once every two weeks or so, if it’s not eliminated entirely. Schools try to find ways to adjust academic schedules to pack in more days of classes earlier in the school year before the administration of the standardized tests. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported a story just last week about several schools in Southeastern Minnesota who got permission to start school several days early in the fall to try to improve their standardized testing scores. The report said that the experiment failed because the schools’ standardized test scores didn’t go up in spite of a few more days of class one year! Teachers are judged, too, on how well their students do on these tests compared to the students of other teachers. To be sure they measure up, the teachers focus on the material that will be tested, to the exclusion of other subjects and other learning experiences. There is not much room left for creative teaching, experiential learning, or innovative lesson plans, the promise of which probably motivated many teachers into entering that profession in the first place. Families are affected too, as teachers fill students’ backpacks with homework designed to boost those all-important test scores.
Entire industries have grown up around standardized testing in our educational institutions. There are, of course, organizations like the Educational Testing Service that create, administer, and score the tests. In addition, there are consultants that specialize in helping school districts figure out ways to improve their students’ performance on the tests.
Click here http://www.yojo.com/ace_your_test.htm for an example of a firm that, for a fee, will come to your elementary school and put on a test prep assembly starring this Cookie Monster look-alike character!
There are also consultants who analyze the results of the tests and compare them to other schools in the district, state, nation, and world. There are organizations like Princeton Review who offer proprietary review courses and prep materials designed to improve individual students’ performance on the tests relative to others.
Testing also creates business for doctors and psychologists who test children for “learning disabilities.” If learning disabilities are identified, these students may get special circumstances for taking the tests, such as private rooms or extra time), or they may be put on prescription drugs designed to improve their concentration, focus, or calm them down if these tests create too much anxiety that interferes with their performance.
Although the private schools are generally exempt from the government-mandated standardized tests required for public schools, preparation for standardized tests, especially the ACT/SAT, is a big part of their focus as well. Private schools market to parents who want to give their children every possible advantage to score big on the college entrance tests, with ads that trumpet their average ACT/SAT test scores and list the prestigious colleges that have accepted their graduates.
Speaking of colleges, they too live by standardized test scores, using them not only to select their entering freshmen, but also to award financial aid packages in a way that is designed to inflate their ACT/SAT averages for marketing purposes. Students with very high ACT/SAT scores get the most generous financial aid awards to lure them to enroll so that the college can claim even more selectivity in their marketing to the next year’s prospective freshmen and their families. http://www.hamline.edu/undergraduate/admission/first-year-scholarships.html
From all this attention on standardized tests throughout the American student’s educational experience, then, it seems that the skill of picking the right answer from A, B, C. or D and accurately transferring that choice onto a bubble sheet quickly enough to complete all or nearly all of the questions in the time allowed must surely be the most important skill a human can have in the real world. Right? Maybe not! Once your formal education is finished and you enter the real world of work and adult life, how many actual bubble sheets will you actually encounter? Beyond a specialized professional license exam to gain entry into a field like law or medicine, the answer is, probably none. And once you pass that last testing hurdle, you’ll probably never see another standardized test as long as you live. Could it be that our entire institution is based on something that’s arguably irrelevant? Choose one: (a) yes (b) no (c) all of the above (d) none of the above. Never mind that this question doesn’t make sense. None of it does.
So if multiple choice bubble sheet skills are not what our children need to prepare them for the competitive global economy of the 21st century, what do they need? One obvious skill is ability in languages beyond English. But wasn’t it foreign language that got cut back in grade school to make more time for drilling on the multiplication tables? How well served are America’s global workers of the 21st century by the decision to axe early exposure to foreign languages? We all know that it’s much harder to try to learn them on our own as adults.
Another skill that will be sorely needed in the working world is the ability to work in groups to solve problems. But as Sir Ken Robinson points out in the supplemental video for this chapter, our educational system’s focus on individual test performance does little to develop that skill. In our system, collaboration is akin to cheating and is to be avoided. Our educational system doesn’t spend very much time on projects that teach us how to work together because that’s not on the standardized tests. A recent experience of mine is a case in point: I recently completed a group project for a laboratory science class that depended entirely on the four-member lab group working together, each doing their assigned piece of a total project, sharing data, agreeing on a hypothesis, designing a research method, and doing all this in a timely manner that allowed each group member to prepare the required individually written report on the results. From the beginning, it became painfully clear that we all needed a lot of work on developing our collaboration skills. Yet, as the supplemental video points out, collaborating is how real problems get solved in the real world. At least we were lucky that we were getting a chance to work this way at Hamline in that class, and a few others. These are skills we all need to develop for a successful future, and yet, our educational institutions usually don’t seem to put such a high priority on helping us to develop them.
Newman points out that in the contemporary educational system in the United States, “course grades, standardized test scores, and class rankings are emphasized so much and create such personal anxiety for students that they may actually overshadow learning and intellectual growth” (p. 262). He observes, however, that despite the fact that the competitive atmosphere of American education “can sometimes create incompatibility between the needs of the individual student and the needs of the system”, without grades and test scores, however, “the competitive system based on survival of the fittest” simply wouldn’t work (p. 262). Could it be that the “survival of the fittest model” is the problem?
I am not suggesting that all standardized testing is unnecessary and invalid. Of course we need to make certain that our schools are educating all children for their place in the world. Having no objective standards, or having ones that are too low won’t help us either. But the educational system’s overwhelming reliance on standardized tests, more and more of them, doesn’t seem to be the best way for the institution of education in the United States to address what Newman calls “the fundamental societal need” of teaching young people “what it means to be a member of society in which they live and how to survive in it” Newman, p. 28).
It’s time to find a better way. I certainly wish I knew this answer to this perplexing question. “None of the above” might be scored as correct on the test, but it’s not very helpful for solving the hardest problems in real life, such as this one.
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