Today’s News Journal Dialogue Delaware section dovetails nicely with the post I wrote on Friday. I’ve been told by multiple people, in and out of the education field, that it has the best headline ever. Sometimes cutting through the bullshit calling bullshit bullshit is the best way to garner attention to an important truth: all standardized testing is bullshit. At least in relation to the stated goal of helping students learn and gauging their learning progress.
Representative Sean Matthews, himself a teacher, has penned a wonderful op-ed in the above Dialogue Delaware section, and he uses more polite language to make the same point.
There are many ways to talk about the role standardized testing plays in our public schools, but there’s one question that we have to answer before we can debate the issue: Do these tests make our students smarter, more capable and more prepared to lead successful lives?
After decades of testing at all levels, with different standards, methods, benchmarks and outcomes, the answer to that question is not what we thought it would be. Overwhelming numbers of scholars, parents, statisticians and legislators are starting to realize, with evidence, that standardized testing and the policies that flow from testing are doing more harm than good.
Over the next three months, students in Delaware’s charter and traditional community schools will be asked to take a standardized test called the Smarter Balanced Assessment. The stated goal of this test is to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in our educational system.
But that’s not the whole story.
Most standardized tests are designed by for-profit companies that market their materials to states, which are required by federal law to test public school students in return for federal funding. Under this business relationship, the best interests of the testing firm are not aligned with the best interests of students, teachers and schools. Instead, there is great incentive to make students and their educators look like they’re “failing” so that these same firms can offer their own branded “reforms” and “solutions” to states and districts, for a worthy fee.
The emphasis is mine. Finally, an elected state official is about to touch on the hidden truths about education reform. It is all about the funding. The money is used as the carrot to get states to adopt federal programs, programs developed by the for-profit companies. So you get the money, if you comply with the conditions. One of the conditions was performance testing. Performance testing that will reveal that some students in certain areas will fail, which will then lead to more money being provided to these for-profit companies to come up with solutions, with some of those solutions being Priority Schools, and the further privatization of public education, so that, eventually, public education will cease to exist.
Rep. Matthews continues:
Look at the Red Clay and Christina school districts, which both cover larger geographic areas. Their suburban elementary schools “excel” at the tests, while their city schools “struggle.” The teachers in these districts go to the same specialized trainings, use the same high-quality instructional and technology resources, and are overseen by the same district administrators, yet the vastly different outcomes persist.
Unless we choose to believe that the hundreds of teachers who work in city schools care less about their students than their colleagues in the suburbs, we must acknowledge that poverty, not personnel, is creating the divide in these school systems.
Standardized tests widen this divide, labeling poor students and their schools as “failing” without offering a real solution to the underlying problem that causes the division.
It’s easy to label a school “failing” based solely on test scores. It’s easy to create new schools that use enrollment preferences and “counseling out” techniques to weed out at-risk students. But it’s difficult to fix endemic poverty and lagging parental involvement. We need to do the hard work.
The problem is not teachers. They have been targeted by politicians and the for-profit companies who lobby said politicians as scapegoats because they are an easy target, because no parent wants to believe that the problem is them, or the problem is poverty (which politicians do not have an answer for). No, it is much easier to target teachers and to argue that we need to bust their union, that we need to end their tenure, that we need to fire them.
We want our teachers to teach and our students to learn, free from the threat of being branded as failures, losing their jobs or losing their schools. It’s time for a change and that change starts with two things: 1) Parents need to force a conversation by exercising their right to opt their students out of the Smarter Balanced test; and 2) We need to form a team of experienced Delaware teachers and administrators who can help us correct our course and put us on a path towards a workable, Delaware-centric plan for success for all of our students.
Why are we here, really? Because it is easy to accept free money with innocuous sounding testing requirements than it is to tax the wealthy. Yes, that same old Delaware Liberal refrain again. It is familiar, and we repeat it often, because it is true. Governor Markell and the Democratic General Assembly accepted Race to the Top money because it helped balance the budget at the height of the Great Recession. Opting out is a necessary first step to force these politicians like Jack Markell and Earl Jaques, who are supposed to be on our side, to wake up and end the testing. What, is the Federal Government going to sue Delaware for the Race to the Top money? Let them.