The push is on by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor's Assoication Center for Best Practices to develop a set of common academic standards for America's public schools. The new version details expectations of what students should know and be able to do by the end of high school in math and language arts. All this in an effort to define guidelines for determining college and career readiness. A total of forty-eight states are attached to the effort to develop common core standards in response to the fragmented patchwork of separate state standards in use today. All this effort to quantify what students need to know by the time they graduate high school has been in the making for over fifty years now. We need to be cautious about the unintended consequences of the efforts of government officials to decide what it is that represents the best educational practices in our schools and which standardized tests measure adequate student achievement.
A standardized test is any test that is administered, scored, and interpreted in a standard, predetermined manner(W. James Popham). Such tests are designed to make predictions about how a test taker will perform in a subsequent setting (post-secondary, community college, university, etc.). The ACT and SAT tests are typically used to predict the grades that high school students may earn at the post-secondary level. These tests were never meant to compare results across cohort groups of students nor measure intelligence across various demographic groups.
According to Popham, in an effort to boost student's state standardized test scores many teachers are forced to jettison curricular content not apt to be covered on an upcoming test. As a result, students may end up educationally shortchanged. I ask what about the value of arts education: drama, vocal music, band, jazz ensemble, strings, visual arts, physical education, dance, movement education? Are not these subjects a vital part of the curriculum as well as the core content standards? How about the activities such as student government and extracurricular clubs that serve to engage students in America's schools? Popham refers to the narrowing of curriculum as "Curricular Reductionism", it is becoming more and more like "Curriculum Destructionism".
Popham goes on to state that because it is essentially impossible to raise students' test scores on instructionally insensitive tests, many schools and teachers require seemingly endless practice with items similar to those on an approaching accountability test. This dreary drilling often stamps out any genuine joy students might experience while they learn. Is this the purpose for education? These negative consequences of standardization and standardized tests as measuring tools make it apparent that we are on a path driven by invalid evaluations and misleading consequences about the worth and value of American education. Beyond that, such reliance on standardized tests can dramatically lower the quality of education overall.
To be ready for college and post-secondary career readiness today's students need a more flexible mastery of the fundamentals in each academic discipline. To be ready for the next phase of life, students will also need to be able to apply their content knowledge to new and even unexpected situations throughout their years as graduates in the workforce. For years American industry has been demanding that schools produce thinkers: young workers capable of problem-solving and decision-making, literate, cooperative and collaborative, and loyal to the company ethics and task at hand. Yet public education has been subjected to an unprecedented mountain of state and federal regulations and testing designed to satisfy the political hungar for quantitative data associated with comparitive reductionist interests.
So how does all this benefit our children? Short answer-it does not benefit children. However, since delicate and fragile funding sources are at risk in this era of standardization and standardized tests, schools are forced to embrace standardized testing and the now apparent proposed common academic standards in the name of school reform. We need to weigh carefully the balance any school district must strike between towing the line and producing higher test results with the interests of what the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development calls the "Whole Child" so we do not loose sight of the reason schools exist in the fist place: for children. What do you think?
Posted by Charles Maranzano, Jr. at 4:00 PM
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