Commentary –

The Trouble With Student Testing

That Doesn’t Count

By Chris Powell

Teachers in Connecticut are getting upset over all the testing they have to do for purposes outside those of their own school system. First there were the Connecticut Mastery Tests, administered each year to grades 4, 6, and 8. Now the federal government is about to require its own annual tests for grades 3 through 8. All this testing, teachers complain, is reducing education to rote learning and driving creativity and originality out of the classroom.

There may be something to this complaint. At least with the overlapping of state and federal laws, it will seem questionable to require two outside tests in some grades and none in others.

But the teachers’ complaint fails to address the cause of the growing political sentiment for testing: the sense, especially strong among employers, that many if not most American students are not learning as they should and are not really well educated, and that, in expanding access to college, the country has seen more educational inflation than education itself – the sense that today’s 16 years or so of education are producing no more knowledge and competence than 12 years did a few decades ago.

Plenty of employers would gladly sacrifice some creativity in school techniques as the price of entry-level job applicants who could read, write, and cipher well. Any awareness of history and the world would be a thrilling bonus.

Of course teachers are not any more to blame for education’s decline than are the government, society, and parents particularly. But teachers should acknowledge society’s need for some basic measures of performance and accountability – for both students and themselves. Indeed, if they were agreeable to such measures, they might lead policy here in the right direction instead of just seeming to want to be left on their own.

For the problem is less that there are too many extraneous statewide tests in Connecticut’s public schools than that the statewide tests don’t count for anything. Teachers and school administrators have remarked on this. They put much effort into “teaching to the test” because they want their schools’ scores to compare well with scores of other schools in town and schools in other towns, but many students don’t put effort into taking the tests because the tests don’t count toward their grades or promotion.

But state government and schools themselves have so far lacked the courage to make the tests count. While a state representative this year proposed legislation requiring high school graduates to pass a statewide proficiency test, his bill was watered down to nothing.

For getting that close to education, getting that close to restoring some meaning to promotion from grade to grade and a high school diploma would require acknowledging the failure of some students, and require standing up to parents who want that failure concealed.

Until then, schools probably can expect more testing imposed from outside, as the politics of the problem requires at least the illusion of action.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)