Race To Nowhere is an excellent description of the standardized testing movement. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001,
increased the role of the federal government in public education and
also expanded the role of standardized testing. This morning, I had a
conversation with another educator who was ending a California State
Testing week. The dedication of this teacher is commendable; although
exhausted and stressed, this educator was hopeful that her students did
well. She wanted them to have a chance at the best education possible.
When I mentioned to her the best education possible is not based on
state testing, she went through the myriad of reasons why testing is a
benefit. These alleged benefits of standardized testing permeate the
public educational system causing harm to students, teachers and the
future of public education as a whole.
According to the California Department of Education, the purpose of
standardized testing is “to measure how well students are learning the
knowledge and skills identified in California’s content standards.” In
addition, standardized testing results will assist with focusing
curricular instruction and organizing teaching methods. The goals of
standardized testing seem to be falling short; instead of measuring
student knowledge and focusing instruction and methods, the rigor of
testing seems to be a silent erosion of our school system. A recent
documentary, Race To Nowhere, chronicles the culture of
today’s youth in public school. According to the documentary, the
epidemic of standardized testing has produced a culture for cheating,
disengaging students, stress-related illness, depression, burnout, and
of compromised young adults seemingly unprepared and uninspired for the
future.
“Only a handful of scholars and practitioners have argued in defense
of standardized tests,” wrote Lishing Wang and fellow researchers
Gulbahar H. Beckette and Lionel Brown. The Educational Research Newsletter
analyzed the pros and cons of standard-based assessments. According to
the website one of the pros of these assessments are a common core of
knowledge. These common standards assist in comparing grades across
teachers and schools. Students should be expected to meet common
standards that are challenging and are more than just minimum
requirements regardless of socioeconomic status, race or disability.
The other side argues that by imposing standards on students’ minds
they are constricting intellectual freedom. These standardized tests
oversimplify the core knowledge and do not test higher-order thinking.
Cookie cutter standards either dumb down instruction or condemn
low-ability students to frequent failure. Students can become
disengaged and burned out.
Regardless of the side of the argument, all students, teachers and
schools are not created equal and this fact is not taken into account
when examining the practice of standardization. The practice of
standardized test are to meant to level the playing field when in fact
the playing field with struggling learners in school is never level. In
other words the interventions that are being utilized to assist
struggling students are not individualized or unsuccessful. According
to the California Department of Education website’s data for July of
2008, 13, 237 students took the Math portion of the California Exit
Exam and 13, 373 students took the English portion of the exam. 29% of
the students passed the Math and 30% passed the English portions of the
test for the state. When we superimpose the same standards on every
student, teacher and school, we receive results that are
disappointing—a race to nowhere.
These disappointing results are rooted in non-profit school
communities maintaining for-profit activities, i.e., test scores. Data
has become the catch phrase and teacher’s names are associated directly
with their student’s scores. Improvement has been demanded on the back
of a shocked system, and therefore an increase of assessments and
pacing guides has followed. This increase of standardized testing is
big business for the private sector. There are four companies that
dominate the testing market: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB
McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS
Pearson- three test publishers and one scoring firm. Press reports
value the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million.
There is a top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and
instruction. Policymakers dictate the content, textbook companies
convert the content into materials and schools purchase these materials
for consumption by teachers and students. According to a blog entitled,
When Pedagogy and Policy Collide
written by Brigitte Knudson, what America is experiencing is called
“commodification” of education. In others words, education has became a
commodity or moneymaker. Knudson goes on to state, “Education – the
process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and
government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the
government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all
while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis in the
country that places blame on a system of its own creation that is
intentionally underfunded to perpetuate the cycle.” This marriage of
big business, government and non-profit school communities continues to
lead to disappointment and a move toward privatization of public
education. It’s a lose-lose situation as reformers concentrate on
splintered areas of need while big business and government erode the
core, destroying the public education system right under our noses.
“Race to Nowhere is a call to challenge these current assumptions
and mobilize families, educators, and policy makers for how to best
prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing
and leading citizens,” Race to Nowhere website. Check the website
to find a screening, go see it. Spread the news to educators, parents,
students and your community. Join the Race to Nowhere Facebook Page in
your area. This link is the Los Angeles page.
If a page or community group is not available for your area, start one.
Let’s continue to examine the facts regarding our educational system
and make it our own again.
