The nationwide fad in high-stakes, standardized student testing has failed. Everyone knows it, yet the punishing policy remains in place. It’s time to bring the curtain down on a system that’s enriching private testing companies at the expense of our future.
Almost 30 percent of Texas freshmen (and maybe half of African American and Hispanic students) fail to graduate with a high school diploma. Meanwhile, Texas is paying almost $100 million a year to private testing companies. If we add in the school and district costs of administering the tests, we are wasting billions of dollars each year on high-stakes testing which is failing to produce results.
Too many politicians tiptoe around this failure, afraid that they will seem opposed to “accountability,” a word attached to the high-stakes test in an effort to make them seem, well, accountable. Bureaucrats can mumble all they want about their efforts to use the tests to improve education. It has failed. By every measure, we are wasting our money on a bill of goods sold to us by relentless testing company profiteers like Pearson.
Pearson, a British company that owns the Financial Times and Penguin Books, used its testing and service ventures to turn the company around. Sales rose 22 percent. Profits soared. The company turned a 2008, first-half, $100 million loss into a $44 million dollar net profit in the first half of 2009. Assessment testing gets the credit.
Meanwhile, a 2008 Rice University study pins the blame for Texas’ high drop-out rate on the high-stakes testing and reports drop-out rates among minorities of 60 to 75 percent.
A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin, finds that the Texas public school accountability system contributes directly to low graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation. A disproportionate number of these are African American, Latino, and English Language Learners. This study has serious implications for the nation’s schools under the federal No Child Left Behind law, which was modeled on the Texas accountability system.
By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students in a large urban district the researchers call Brazos City, the study found that 60 percent of the African American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.
Furthermore, a recent study by Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service found that the drop-out rate was costing Texans $9.6 billion over the lifetimes of the students we have failed.
At a Washington, D.C. education conference last week, the deans of education schools at Harvard and Stanford, and education and child development experts from other prestigious universities, were unanimous in their condemnation of the high-stakes tests.
This is one of those issues where virtually all expert opinion is on one side while policy makers cling stubbornly to yesterday’s fad.
Making our public schools accountable was a worthy goal. Some on the Right wanted to use the tests to point up failures of public education to further their goal of getting taxpayer money for private schools. But many well-meaning people thought the high-stakes tests might improve education.
They haven’t. Instead, the test-centered policy is destroying the possibility for real education by forcing teachers to “teach to the test.” Individual classroom attention on students is diminished. Teacher morale plummets. Students are labeled failures early in life, a self-fulfilling label that is condemning millions of Texans to second-class lives.
Back in 1989, Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby proposed a package of bills we called an anti-crime plan. The bills focused on early childhood intervention, pre-natal care for mothers in poverty, pre-K for needy three-year-olds. Every expert in criminology, education and child development will testify to the benefits of saving children early in their lives. Gov. Rick Perry was among the House members who voted for those bills. Most were just pilot projects, and most have long since lapsed.
That was two decades ago. It’s not like policy makers don’t know the right thing to do. It is common knowledge.
Instead, we waste billions of dollars on high-stakes tests which are not only failing, they are contributing to the problem. What could we achieve if we poured the billions we waste on testing into the classroom? We could lower class sizes, identify children with health and learning problems early. We could reward skilled educators. We would save lives.
If we don’t educate our children, we have no future. A day of reckoning is coming, and everyone knows that, too. When a majority of Texans no longer have high-school diplomas, businesses will quit coming here. Those that need educated workers will leave. Crime will increase. The economy will weaken further.
This will happen because some politicians remain fearful of change while others believe that enriching a company like Pearson is worth the loss of our state’s future.
I don’t see any reason to tiptoe around this problem any longer. Fiddling with the kinds and numbers of high-stakes test is no longer acceptable.
Eliminate the tests. Do it for the children. Now.
Hey Glenn,
Great article. It may be helpful to see the contrast between US education (based on an “accountability” model) and the #1 public education system in the world – Finland.
I’ve met with one of the designers of the Finnish system, Pasi Sahlberg, and he told me that there isn’t even a word for accountability in Finnish culture! Their model, which exemplifies best practices to the world, is based on:
1. Treating teachers a professionals and experts (then investing heavily in professional development)
2. Allowing each school to design its own curriculum so that best practices are tailored with the strengths of local communities
3. Reducing the amount of time teachers are in class (about half the hours we require in the US) so that teachers have plenty of time to refine and improve their curricula
Sound like a teacher’s fantasy? It is… and it works incredibly well.
Here are some resources on the Finnish system:
http://www.pasisahlberg.com
Best,
Joe Brewer
Founder, Cognitive Policy Works
Joe, I hope many of our readers follow your tip here. Amazing what the translation of current knowledge can do when actually translated into policy.
There have been and remain major concerns about the educational achievement of America’s young as both the economy and the political system require higher levels of knowledge and sophistication than we have been turning out; and the deficiencies are especially apparent among certain minority groups, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Ever increasing standardized testing and rote drill learning are not the answer, as educators have known all along; in fact, the high stakes testing mania has greatly reduced the outcomes and led many well-meaning middle-class parents to remove their children from the dumbed-down system. The problem is that the face of society that is seen by young people is extremely stupid, anti-intellectual and anti-achievement; only the counter-examples presented by non-absentee parents, particularly in middle-class families, works against these images. As a high school teacher, I found that many underachieving students imagined they were going to become wildly successful NBA stars or pop musicians and that academic classes were a plot to get in their way. Only actions at the level of social change, including early childhood interventions and perhaps a less dumbed-down level of TV and music programming, is likely to make wholesale changes. In school, nothing can make more difference than smart, well-trained and caring teachers who are free to do real teaching.
Thank you for this, Gary. And thanks for your personal and professional commitment to our children.
Part of the problem is that teachers are NOT teaching to the test. High school teachers are teaching science as discreet bits of knowledge – endless powerpoints, that are read out loud to students, while they copy them on paper they will throw away, and that have no interest or meaning to them. Instead, if they focused on the science on the TAKS test, they would be doing experiments, analyzing data, drawing conclusions and applying knowledge to new situations.
Part of the problem is the punishment aspect of our accountability system, but TAKS in and of itself should be bringing the quality of teaching up. The language of TAKS is difficult and the level of questions are difficult, particularly in high school – and especially for English Language Learners.
If there was a real goal of graduating kids from high school, what would our teaching and accountability systems look like? That’s what we should be addressing. I’m not a big fan of throwing everything we are doing out now, and starting over. I think a big step in the right direction would be using TAKS as a way to ensure best practices in teaching and make it less about punishment.
Very good information from all — thanks. Maybe my favorite: “Treating teachers a(s) professionals and experts.”