What Exactly are we testing?

 What Exactly are we testing?

 

Once upon a time someone got the idea that testing would improve education.  In truth, testing has been used to punish teachers for not doing a good enough job.  In some school districts teachers whose students got high test scores got salary bonuses.  In other districts, when kids got low test scores, teachers were poorly rated.   It came as a HUGE surprise when there were testing scandals because staff were helping kids get higher scores.  Heads rolled.

Then came the pandemic and a chance for folks to take a breath (behind a mask of course) and consider if this idea of testing was all that terrific.   It would be easy to blame the testing pause on the fact that online learning was proving to be not as effective as in the classroom face -to-face and those low scores would punish teachers, schools and school districts.  There was another opportunity to reconsider testing.  The new President brought with him a new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona.  There was hope among the folks who didn’t see testing as the holy grail.  But at his confirmation hearing, Cardona said that he supported the testing required by federal law.   “If we don’t assess where our students are and their level of performance, it’s going to be difficult for us to provide targeted support and resource allocation in the manner that can best support the closing of the gaps that have been exacerbated due to this pandemic” he said.

All of those fine words make the assumption that testing does indeed measure the students’ levels of performance, with or without a pandemic.  In fact, educators have repeatedly said that test scores are more a measure of a student’s demographics such as race, family income, parental educational attainment and the student’s ability to test well.  All of these factors are confounding variables in  measuring achievement. Each of them impacts the validity of the test, i.e. measuring what the test says it measures.

A total of 548 scholars and academic researchers have sent a letter to Cardona saying that there is no empirical research based evidence to support the value of testing as a measurement of either student learning or teaching ability.  Yet we continue to test because the testing yields a number.  It is a meaningless number but still it is a number.

Testing could be useful if we forgot about the number and its ability to reward or punish educators.  Instead, we could use the tests to describe where kids are having difficulty and may need to be retaught or taught differently.  Now there's a concept.

There are no other professions where the professional’s clients are tested to measure the quality of the professional.  It is not like teachers have these great lesson plans that they are holding in reserve and they will pull them out to rescue test scores.  Really can’t we get some benefit from the pandemic and just forget the tests