Disaster: Rising Test Scores

[George Sheridan <learn@JPS.NET>]

This is one of three articles in the Sacramento Bee Sunday Forum for
December 1, 2002 criticizing standardized tests and testocracy and
emphasizing the importance of teachers.

Next disaster in American education: Rising test scores
By Anthony Ralston
Special to the Bee

No, that's not a misprint. Test scores have been rising in Texas for some
time. Now they have started rising in California and, courtesy of the No
Child Left Behind Act, scores will soon start rising in many other states.

Not only will these rising test scores not herald an improvement in
American education; they will serve to hide an inevitable further decline
in American elementary and secondary education.

Improving education will always improve scores on well-designed tests. But
when the central aim of educational change is just to improve test scores,
improved education is seldom the result.

The recent rise in math test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School
District provides a good example of why this is so. When, as in California,
you introduce a new, rather narrow curriculum, give teachers little
flexibility in how they present this curriculum and hold teachers
accountable for their pupils' scores on tests aimed at that curriculum,
teachers will inevitably teach-to-the-test and the result, also inevitably,
will be a rise in test scores.

Do these higher test scores reflect increased learning of mathematics?
Almost certainly not. What the higher scores reflect is the learning of
particular skills, often unrelated to the further study of mathematics and
often at the expense of a broader curriculum that would really prepare
students for the further study of mathematics.

Thus, rising scores on standardized tests are not only not a sign of
significant learning (in mathematics and other subjects) but, as well, they
hide continuing serious deficiencies in the mathematical learning of children.

Still worse, they give politicians and, it must be said, some educationists
something to crow about when nothing good is happening. Worst of all, they
give parents a false sense that the learning of their children is improving
when it is not.

Actually, things are even worse than I claimed above. Forcing teachers to
teach to a rigid curriculum may give inadequate teachers (particularly, for
elementary school teachers in mathematics) more security. But for fully
professional, well prepared teachers, this is a sure way to make them
dissatisfied and too ready to leave a profession that is already
hemorrhaging highly qualified teachers. By far the greatest need in
American education today is to attract intellectually able teachers at all
levels and in all subjects.

The rigidities imposed by the testing regime mandated by the No Child Left
Behind Act will set back the cause of upgrading the cadre of teachers we
need in American classrooms by years if not decades.

-MORE-
*****
Anthony Ralston is professor emeritus of computer science and mathematics
at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently an Academic
Visitor at Imperial College in London, and can be reached by e-mail at
ar9@doc.ic.ac.uk

George Sheridan

You cannot measure a love for learning or a joy of knowledge or a passion
for life. You cannot measure those things with a standardized test but you
can sure kill them.


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