Standardized tests and the uses to which they have been put have a very troubled history — and in many ways that is still true today. One very common response to this situation has been attempts to marginalized or eliminate standardized tests, or at least any meaning that make provide a foundation for decision-making.
And yet, teachers should still be accountable to principals, parents and students, schools accountable to communities and school boards, and school districts accountable to communities and various levels of governmental oversight.
There has been this idea that standardized tests are responsible for bad decisions that have used them as justification. This idea persists, even though poor school funding and marginalization — within our schools! – of low performing students and populations go back as long as any concept of schooling has existed.
There has been this idea that if we can protect students from the evil tests which come from those unknown strangers that we will ensure that those who know and love them best are will do right by them. And I agree that that is the best case. That is what I want teachers, schools and school districts to do.
But actual history shows us that that is often not the case. We have too often settled for unacceptably low performance from some children and expected even less from others. Too often, educators and policy-makers have been blinded by the soft bigotry of low expectations. Dumbing down assessments so every kid will score well on them does a disservice to the very populations and communities that our educational systems has so long failed to do right by.
Now, I am the the first one to assail the quality of our standardized assessments. They really do need to be changed. But the answer cannot be to make them so easy that they are incapable of providing any meaningful information. That perpetuates the false senses of complacency that this child is being well-served and that community is having its educational needs met. It lowers the bar on what we can expect from our schools, and I find that entirely unacceptable.
On the other hand, simply making tests more difficult is no better an answer. It is trivial to accomplish, but it too fails to provide useful information.
Rather, each state has standards that define what students should learn in each grade. Some set of standards has been endorsed through our democratic processes in each state (i.e., by state legislatures and signed onto by governors). We know what the children should be learning — at least academically. Our standardized tests must to a better job of assessing those goals, so that parents, communities, school boards and other levels of government can make appropriate decisions about how to better support our children.
While these academically-focused standardized test should not be the only basis that policy-makers used to make decisions about our schools and not the only basis by which community members should evaluate their schools, they deserve better information about this core function of schools, not lesser.