Quick Facts About Standardized Testing and No Child Left Behind – NCLB

Below you will find the problem with No Child Left Behind, or as most call it, NCLB.  There are pros and cons to NCLB, but in my opinion, the cons heavily outweigh the pros.  Essentially, there are better ways to accomplish the pros, without the No Child Left Behind Cons.

While some of these facts have been posted based on previous reading, I decided to pull some off of the George Lucas Educational Foundation web site called Edutopia.org and list them here.

• “Standardized tests have been used to evaluate America’s schools since 1965, when the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) became law.
• “That statute provided for the first major infusion of federal funds into local schools and required educators to produce test-based evidence that ESEA dollars were well spent.”
• “…the SAT and ACT are used to predict the grades that high school students will earn when they get to college.”
• “In contrast, standardized achievement tests (Like our MAP scores) indicate how well a test taker has acquired knowledge and mastered certain skills.”
• Nationally standardized achievement test need to produce a range of scores (score-spread) from all test takers.
• In order to produce these variations in scores for comparative data, test writers have learned to tie the successful answering of questions to a students socio-economic status. A student above the median socio-economic status will answer the question correctly more often, while the one below the median socio-economic status does not. This gives the test writers the score-spread they were looking for for comparative data.
• “Unfortunately, this kind of test tends to measure not what students have been taught in school but what they bring to school. That’s the reason there’s such a strong relationship between a school’s standardized-test scores and the economic and social makeup of that school’s student body.”
• In Plain-English, this means that all of this tax money is being spent on an annual basis to tell us what we already know, and that is what the socio-economic status of our community is.
• A second kind of instructionally insensitive test is the sort of standardized achievement test that has been developed for accountability by many states during the past two decades.
• Such tests were typically created to better assess students’ mastery of the officially approved skills and knowledge.
• When a state’s education officials decide to identify the skills and knowledge that students should master, the typical procedure for doing so hinges on the recommendations of subject-matter specialists from that state.
• The resultant litanies (repetitive results) of committee-chosen content standards tend to resemble curricular wish lists rather than realistic targets.
• Educators must guess about which of this multitude of content standards will actually be assessed on a given year’s test.
• After working with standards-based tests aimed at so many targets, teachers understandably may devote less and less attention to those tests. As a consequence, students’ performances on this type of instructionally insensitive test often become dependent upon the very same SES (Socio-Economic Status) factors that compromise the utility of nationally standardized achievement tests when used for school evaluation.
• Three Big Consequences of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind are:

  • Curricular reductionism.

    In an effort to boost their students’ NCLB test scores, many teachers jettison curricular content that — albeit important — is not apt to be covered on an upcoming test. As a result, students end up educationally shortchanged.

  • Excessive drilling.

    Because it is essentially impossible to raise students’ scores on instructionally insensitive tests, many teachers — in desperation — 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 (and should) experience while they learn.

  • Modeled dishonesty.

    Some teachers, frustrated by being asked to raise scores on tests deliberately designed to preclude such score raising, may be tempted to adopt unethical practices during the administration or scoring of accountability tests. Students learn that whenever the stakes are high enough, the teacher thinks it’s OK to cheat. This is a lesson that should never be taught.

An AntidoteIs it possible to build accountability tests that both supply accurate evidence of school quality and promote instructional improvement? The answer is an emphatic yes. In 2001, prior to the enactment of NCLB, an independent national study group, the Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment, identified three attributes that an “instructionally supportive” accountability test must possess:

A modest number of supersignificant curricular aims.

To avoid overwhelming teachers and students with daunting lists of curricular targets, an instructionally supportive accountability test should measure students’ mastery of only an intellectually manageable number of curricular aims, more like a half-dozen than the 50 or so that a teacher may encounter today. However, because fewer curricular benchmarks are to be measured, they must be truly significant.

Lucid descriptions of aims.

An instructionally helpful test must be accompanied by clear, concise, and teacherpalatable descriptions of each curricular aim to be assessed. With clear descriptions, teachers can direct their instruction toward promoting students’ mastery of skills and knowledge rather than toward getting students to come up with correct answers to particular test items.

Instructionally useful reports.

Because an accountability test that supports teaching is focused on only a very limited number of challenging curricular aims, a student’s mastery of each subject can be meaningfully measured, letting teachers determine how effective their instruction has been. Students and their parents can also benefit from such informative reports.

These three features can produce an instructionally supportive accountability test that will accurately evaluate schools and improve instruction. The challenge before us, clearly, is how to replace today’s instructionally insensitive accountability tests with better ones. Fortunately, at least one state, Wyoming, is now creating its own instructionally supportive NCLB tests. More states should do so.

What You Can Do

If you want to be part of the solution to this situation, it’s imperative to learn all you can about educational testing. Then learn some more. For all its importance, educational testing really isn’t particularly complicated, because its fundamentals consist of commonsense ideas, not numerical obscurities. You’ll not only understand better what’s going on in the current mismeasurement of school quality, you’ll also be able to explain it to others. And those “others,” ideally, will be school board members, legislators, and concerned citizens who might, in turn, make a difference. Simply hop on the Internet or head to your local library and hunt down an introductory book or two about educational assessment. (I’ve written several such books that, though not as engaging as a crackling good spy thriller, really aren’t intimidating.)

With a better understanding of why it is so inane — and destructive — to evaluate schools using students’ scores on the wrong species of standardized tests, you can persuade anyone who’ll listen that policy makers need to make better choices. Our 40-year saga of unsound school evaluation needs to end. Now.

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