The Big Standardized Test Is Still The Worst Thing In Education

For forty-some years, an array of forces have tried to shape public education in damaging ways, and I have bitched about pretty much all of them in this space. But if you gave me the power to wipe any one of these ugly insects off the windshield of public education, I would not need to think for a second. The worst--the very worst--of the forces employed to dismantle and disfigure public education is the Big Standardized Test.

The BS Test, an annual event inflicted by the state on every public school system, has undergone its own transformative journey even as it has been employed by an assortment of toxic movements. Let's collect data on students so that we track them cradle-to-career, the better to let employers order up the exact meat widgets they're shopping for. Let's come up with objective data that will let us pinpoint the worst schools so we can dismantle them. Let's collect data that will let us pinpoint the worst teachers so we can fire our way to excellence. Let's make every state use the same BS Test so that we can put some teeth behind a national standards movement.

And it hasn't made a damned bit of difference which politicians were in charge. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden-- every one of them has kept the BS Test grinding away like a blind badger digging its way through the guts of the public education system.

BS Testing has warped schooling itself. The tests create a hierarchy of content, with schools reducing the amount of arts, music, science, history, even recess because that content is Not On The Test. Not that favored content fares any better; in English class, full texts have been replaced with short excerpts, and meaningful slow, thoughtful discussion has been replaced with a quick solitary race to answer multiple choice questions.

Test-centered schooling encourages sorting students into three groups, usually via more time-wasting "practice" or "benchmark" tests early in the year. Students are labeled as 1) probably going to get a good score on the BS Test, 2) probably no hope they'll get a good score on the BS Test, and 3) enough of a borderline case that if we really hammer them, maybe we can get a good score out of them. Group 3 gets to suffer intensive test prep. That's because test-centered school is upside down-- the school is not there to serve the students' educational needs; instead, the students are there to serve the school's need for good data, aka high scores.

In that pursuit, we waste soooo much time on the test. Prepping for it, practicing for it, taking it-- the school year has been radically shortened by the BS Test.

And as the BS Test became cemented as part of the status quo, a generation has absorbed the notion that the BS Test is the whole point of school, that the year is about prepping for the test and once the test is done, the year is basically open. At an even deeper level, we find the underlying assumption being passed on that Understanding and Knowing are just the acts of selecting and plugging in the One Correct Answer (which is already known by someone Out There). And these meager and stunted ideas about education and school are now part of a self-feeding loop as students who have spent their life on this tiny treadmill come back to the classroom as teachers.

You can argue that attempts have been made to reduce the high stakes of BS Testing, but little has been done that made a difference. A decade of insistence that this test is a valid measure of school, teacher and student achievement has produced a public that thinks "what are the test scores like" is an incisive probe into school quality--and many of those folks are now on school boards.

If that were the end of the matter, it would be problematic enough. But every troubling trend in public education has been nourished with water from this toxic spring.

Of course, BS Test scores were important in selling school privatization, allowing fans of that movement to claim that they had hard data "proving" that public schools were failing. When it turned out that results for charter and private schools weren't any better, BS Test scores quietly exited the discussion. But the damage was done; one of the biggest frauds perpetrated in education policy and journalism is the continued use of "student achievement" as a euphemism for "test scores."

Yet there's a secondary effect-- the BS Test has made alternatives to public school more attractive by making public schools less attractive, because it turns out that parents are not that excited about subjecting their children to test-centered schooling and its hollowed-out de-humanized version of education.

As we've sold the idea that knowledge and understanding are about being able to Pick The Right Answer, it's no wonder we've also seen the rise of "Why should students learn stuff when they can just google the right answer." This is life under the BS Test-- schooling is about grabbing right answers and generating data deliverables.

The widely reported difficulties with student behavior and attendance have complex roots, but BS Test-based schooling shares some of the blame. What is there in test-centered schooling to engage students? What is the message beyond "As long as you can pick up those answers on the test, the job is done." I'll argue that when the treadmill stopped for the big pandemic pause of 2020, many folks looked at what they had been doing on autopilot and thought, "Wow, that was some bullshit." That includes students, because by 2020, test-centered school had injected a great deal of BS into schools (not that I'm going to argue that schools were ever fertilizer-free pastures).

Ditto for teachers. Of all the things that inspire people to go into the profession, "I've always wanted to help students prep for a mediocre multiple choice standardized test" is not top of the list. The BS Test is a monument to the general stripping of autonomy from the profession, encouraging districts to prescribe exactly how and what teachers should teach.

Even the newest educational panic over AI owes much to BS Testing. AI moves most easily into spaces where heart and humanity have already been hollowed out, and a system centered on forking over the preferred answer is primed for AI. Approach students with an attitude of "Just fork over the right answer, kid," and they will find a quick and easy way to do just that.

We could argue about all of the above if the BS Test was actually useful for something. It is not.

Teachers are not allowed to see the questions on the test, and therefor get results that are meaningless, vague, broad, and way too late. And that's before we even get to the baloney of using maths to beat data into value-added scores. We have seen repeatedly that school level results correlate directly to socio-economic demographic data.

That correlation is meaningless because twenty-some years in, we still don't have a lick of data (despite the claims of Hanushek et al) that raising BS Test scores improves life outcomes. The premise is that if we take a student who would have scored 55 on the test and fix her so she'll score a 75, she'll be more successful, make more money, and have a better life. Researchers have had decades to provide evidence of that premise and yet they haven't found enough evidence to cover a gnat's eyelash.

And that's before we even address the question of whether or not students even make a serious attempt on these things.

"But if we stop giving the Big Standardized Test," come the objections, "how will we hold schools accountable? How will we know how schools are doing?"

You know what's worse than not knowing something? Believing you've got an answer when you don't. Ceasing the search for the truth because you have accepted a lie in its place. Or, to quote Josh Billings (probably), "I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so."

I agree that accountability is important, and that we should know how schools are doing. Big Standardized Tests don't give us either of those, and in fact make public education worse and less accountable. The answer to those objectors' question is, "You don't know any of those things now, and you are damaging the system at the same time."

Lord knows I'm not going to argue that eliminating the BS Test would return public education to some imaginary state of perfect grace. There are other issues that need--have always needed--to be addressed. But test-centered schooling is an obstacle rather than an aid to pursuing those improvements.

One of the challenges of public schools is inertia, and after all these years, the BS Tests have inertia on their side. When the pandemic pause hit, there was a moment when that inertia was interrupted, and testophiles panicked and fought hard to keep testing, and mostly, they won. Now some states are testing more (while pretending they'll test less). I haven't said anything here that I haven't said multiple times over the past umpteen years, but one of the ways that institutional inertia works is that Bad New Ideas become that Same Old Thing We're Tired Of Complaining About.

If we're looking for things to reform, axing the BS Test would be a great place to start. We wouldn't lose much of anything worth having, and we would take back time, money and focus for education in this country.