To Test or Not to Test

To Test or Not to Test

For a moment, just suppose:
You are a high school English teacher, and your class has just read a short story in the assigned textbook. The story is about a teenager who has a run-in with a parent, and after some difficulties, there is a comfortable resolution. You question the students about various aspects of the plot and characterization. A student offers that he knows someone who has been through a similar situation, and it didn’t work out as well. Another student suggests that maybe the story had too happy an ending, but four hands go up and a student says she thought the ending was very realistic. Another student called upon says he didn’t like the story at all, but he is countered by another who says it was at least not boring like yesterday’s lesson. More hands go up, but before you can call on them, the bell rings. As they leave the room, a student says to you, Hey, it was interesting today!
For a moment, you are pleased: it was a good lesson. The kids were really involved, and they had made a connection between literature and their lives - a good sign that might lead to reading more on their own. And then you remembered: it was one day closer to the test, and you had not mentioned how the author used symbols and similes, the kind of thing likely to show up on the test. The kids had a good lesson in literature, but how are they going to do on the test?
“The test.” The president likes testing. The legislators like testing. The media report on testing. After all, how else will anyone know whether you have taught the kids anything? And if the kids do not do well on the test, maybe it will mean that you aren’t the good teacher you just thought that you were.
And sure enough, when the day comes, the test has questions that require the students to understand symbolism, and there is a specific question about similes. You failed to make those points; maybe some of the kids picked it up from the discussion, but it was up to you to make sure. You are not a good teacher after all.
A bit silly, yes? But that is the problem teachers are up against when testing becomes the guideline, the goal, the answer, to the big question of how much education is taking place in any classroom. Knowing in general what is going to be on the test, it is up to you to teach to that test. The test makers aim at determining how many facts a student has mastered about a subject - not necessarily the subject as it is taught in your class or school, but just in general. The math questions, for example, may go beyond what is reasonable in every class or school; the questions about literature may probe for technicalities but overlook a basic like an adolescent’s emotional response. Nevertheless, and no matter how teaching to the test reduces a lesson to rote memorizing and leaves no time for critical thinking or reasoning, you must prepare your students for passing that test.
In the abstract, testing the students seems a fair way to determine whether they have been adequately taught. But students in a classroom are not abstractions. They are real: just about all are scared when test time comes around; some of them come from homes in poverty and are ill fed, tired, worried, and half sick; some of them come from homes where another language is spoken and the children are still learning English; some have special needs, are intellectually challenged and simply cannot keep up on academic matters. But all of them must be sitting there, taking the tests.
And the test results are taken very seriously by those in charge of the schools. They are to be used as measurements of teacher quality, of school quality, of school district quality - even of eligibility for money from government.
Moreover, there is the matter of how those tests are scored. They can actually make it impossible to measure real improvement. If the tests produce a median score - i.e. the number halfway between the best and the worst raw score - and the next year a school district does better by ten points, the median climbs higher, and schools which actually did improve by five points have dropped below the middle and are classified as below par, deficient. Seems crazy, but that’s how tests work.
Standardized tests simply cannot, by their very nature, fairly test the children of an entire city or state. We know from research (Public Policy Institute of California, for example) that socioeconomic factors play a huge role in test results, and everyone - from district administration through teachers and the kids - is unfairly, inappropriately labeled. To withhold government funds or to judge teacher quality by the current testing system is simply wrong.