High Stakes Educational Testing
by
Doug Noble
Dear Friend of Education: The Coalition for Common Sense in Education is a local, grassroots coalition of parents, students, educators and concerned citizens aligned with other groups in New York State and around the country, whose purpose is to encourage critical debate and strategic action in response to the burgeoning use of high-stakes standardized tests in our schools.
While we are deeply committed to improvements in teaching and learning within all our schools, we are convinced that the high-stakes use of standardized tests to improve learning by hurriedly ratcheting up the accountability of students, teachers and schools does not solve the problems in our schools but compounds them.
Such prominent organizations as the National Research Council, the National Council of Teachers of English, the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the American Educational Research Association, the National Education Association, and the International Reading Association have all issued bold policy statements warning against the misuse of standardized tests as a single measure for determining children’s grade promotion, graduation, or college admission. This is also the recommendation of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Measurement recently adopted by testing developers themselves.
Standardized test scores have been repeatedly shown to correlate almost perfectly with the socioeconomic status of students and schools, and so they are undeniably biased against our poorest students and schools. The erosion of rich curriculum and creative instruction is also a well documented result of mounting pressures on teachers and schools to teach in lockstep to the tests throughout the year. Parents and educators are deeply concerned as well for students with learning disabilities, limited English proficiency, test-taking anxieties, or those with non-academic goals and talents, for whom no exemptions from the tests are allowed.
Additional concerns have been raised across the state and country about soaring failure rates on tests, the questionable administration and misgrading of tests, increased retention and dropout rates caused by testing, inequitable penalization of teachers and schools, and misalignment between test content and school curriculum. Several states have put their testing programs on hold for these reasons, amid mounting pressure from parent and teacher groups.
Yet, despite all these reasonable concerns and recommendations, the New York State Commissioner of Education and the Regents are proceeding full speed ahead in the inflexible implementation of the new Regents examinations, willfully ignoring other time-tested options available to improve the teaching and learning in our schools. We at the Coalition for Common Sense in Education are working to encourage parents, educators, students, and policymakers to reconsider this frenzied testing craze in light of the evidence, before it is too late for many of our children. Please join us!
The Coalition for COMMON SENSE IN
EDUCATION
CCSE B7 PO Box 10606, Rochester, NY 14610 B7
(716) 234-0189
Steering Committee: