Over the past four years on this blog, I’ve strived to advance a substantive conversation around standards and assessment through complex (and hopefully interesting) policy arguments. But finding new things to advance a discussion sometimes means losing sight of large and obvious things that need to be said over and over again. So, in my first post since returning to the world of schools, I want to make a completely obvious point: standards-aligned, summative tests are really, really important to providing students—especially our most disadvantaged students—with the education they deserve.
Yet, in the increasingly acerbic debate over school reform, these kinds of state-driven standardized tests have become an easy scapegoat for everything that ails education policy broadly and standards-driven reform more specifically. Indeed, with all the political capital being spent to save Common Core, opponents of the accountability side of standards-and-accountability-driven reform have seized an opportunity to push back against statewide testing mandates—to throw the tests under the bus in order to “save” the standards.
Leading the charge are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the nation’s largest teachers unions, who’ve long pushed back on the notion that assessment data should be a factor in school and/or teacher accountability. This summer, the NEA capitalized on the anti-CCSS momentum to launch a targeted campaign against “toxic testing.” And NEA president Lily Eskelsen García went as far as saying that that state CCSS-aligned tests are “corrupting the Common Core” and that they are made by people who “don’t have a clue” what they’re doing.
Adding insult to injury, a Florida school district voted to opt out of state tests last week. (They’ve since rescinded their decision, but the anti-test gauntlet has been thrown.)
While opposition to state testing may not be surprising when it comes from teachers unions and reform critics, the backpedaling on testing we’ve started to see from the reform community is. No doubt in response to the increased anti-CCSS blowback, Arne Duncan just announced a plan to allow states to delay using student standardized test results“to take that pressure off teachers” and emphasizing that “[w]e’re all concerned about this issue of over-testing.”
Of course, some of this blowback is well founded. Duncan is certainly right, for instance, that over-testing is a real issue, particularly in districts where mandatory interim assessments have been piled atop already time-consuming state-test requirements. And policymakers are right to take a hard look at some of the most technocratic state accountability systems. This is particularly true for state-mandated teacher-evaluation schemes that rely on using tests for individual teacher evaluation—something current tests were never designed to do with any reliability—and for state-report-card systems that pretend to be able to differentiate between “A” and “B” schools with any degree of certainty.
At the same time, though, the antidote to overtesting—or to the overzealoused use of test data—isn’t to return to a day when there was no objective, systematic way to measure student mastery of at least some clearly defined, core content. In fact, throwing tests overboard in order to save the standards may well end up being a pyrrhic victory.
This issue came into sharp—and very personal—relief when the latest New York State test scores were released. This is my first year back in schools since the Common Core was adopted in 2010. And as the new superintendent of a network of six urban Catholic schools, I was halfway into our principals’ leadership retreat when the results came in. And the news was tough, even if not surprising.
Nobody likes bad news, but the experience reminded me of the power of hard facts. Because our school culture is strong, because our teachers and principals are so hard working, and because there are so many adults genuinely working to serve the needs of the children in our care, it would be easy to assume that our students are just fine. These data provide an important reminder that we need to do more...or rather, we need to do different.
The reality is that there is no replacement for external, impartial, evaluative achievement data. In fact, the very reason we talk so much about the “achievement gap” today, and the reason that we are so focused on how best to close that gap—through a combination of educational and social services—is because of the hard facts that our current crop of state standardized tests has provided.
Of course, critics are right that any system of accountability—whether for individuals, schools, or districts—needs to look at more than a one-time score on a state standardized test. But we also must acknowledge that those data do matter. And they can and should play an important role in school evaluation, in identifying best practices, and in figuring how we can ensure that another generation of children doesn’t graduate without the knowledge and skills they will need to fully participate in society.
And, on the small scale of our six schools, these data are helping to refocus and shift the conversation; they are helping us have the difficult conversations that our students need us to be having. That is invaluable, and it’s hard to imagine it happening if we relied only on norm-referenced tests and/or classroom-level assessment data.
So it may not be a complex point and it certainly doesn’t fit with the direction the ed-reform debate seems to be heading. But from where I am standing, it’s hard to imagine doing the challenging work we are undertaking without the benefit of rigorous, even if imperfect, tests.
