Standardized Testing

What does it achieve?

“Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning: most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposite. One is dedicated to experience, the other to control.” (French 1985, 388) In current education, the focus is on a results-oriented curriculum, where success is measured by achievement scores on standardized tests. Selma Wasserman (2001, 32) explores why education authorities, parents, and even some teachers feel the need for standardized testing when she says,

It is easy to see how numbers relieve the frustration of the unknown, for nothing feels more certain or gives greater security than a number...It doesn’t seem to matter if neither the numbers nor the act of measurement can be relied on as precise and accurate; it’s just that we feel more comfortable in believing that there is something that anchors us, something we can count on with assurance, something we can cling to as we speed ahead into uncertain times...Hearing the numbers takes us from the unknown to the known.

Instead of testing, Wasserman advocates active learning experiences that provide student-generated curriculum through choice of topic, which enables motivation and self-esteem in students. (Wasserman, 1990)

Holt (2002, 268) discusses how, “Commitment to standards-led school reform means creating a system of schools geared solely to the product —test results —and not to the process of creating educative experiences.” He goes on to say that,

Gerald Bracey has offered a few of the personal attributes that standardized tests cannot measure - attributes crucial to the cultivation of the virtues and the formation of moral agents: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, humour, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership and compassion.

Current public criticism of education insinuates that standards are not high enough and students are not prepared for the evolving global economy. The critics’ solutions to this perceived problem with education are, “first, to make the curriculum more demanding; second, to force teachers to stick to it; and third to test students to see how well it has been taught and learned” (Osborne 1999, 32).

Wasserman (2001, 33) discusses the ideas put forth by Marilyn French in the book, Beyond Power, regarding how our education system is structured along corporate lines as a way of “exercising power and control over students, a system that teaches students to bend to the will of authority” and “in the contention between those who uphold qualitative goals for education and those who focus on quantitative efficiency of administration, the big guns are all on the side of the heavily concentrated controls of the managers.”

This quest for power and control has created a school environment that is concerned with number crunching, test taking and surveys, which has resulted in teachers having less time for establishing meaningful experiences with children. These stifling solutions do not take into account the rich diversity and uniqueness our classrooms have to offer, ignoring the middle ground where most of the learning takes place. “We live in the middle. When education forsakes the middle for the ends, or beginnings it is deadly” (Grumet 1996, 17).