The High Price of Boosting Test Scores

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

> HIGHER TEST SCORES COME AT A HIGH PRICE TO EDUCATION
>    Baltimore Sun Opinion Column -- July 11, 2006
>                   by John Monahan
>
> Great news: Test scores for Maryland students went up. Politicians, 
> education officials and school administrators have been 
> congratulating themselves on the achievement. Even the scores in 
> Baltimore went up. Do you know what that means? Absolutely nothing.
>
> That's right, it doesn't mean anything because the test doesn't 
> measure or predict anything. Higher scores don't mean that children 
> are better educated, are more likely to graduate or have a better 
> chance of getting into college or have a well-paying job.
>
> We're told that the tests measure academic achievement. Education 
> officials, while scrambling to find cover from the No Bureaucrat 
> Left Behind law, like to tout these rising scores, saying they 
> indicate the improvement of education in the state.
>
> What they don't tell you is that the increasing scores measure only 
> the schools' ability to prepare students for the tests. The schools 
> are frequently putting all of their energy and resources into test 
> preparation, to the exclusion of everything else.
>
> I experienced an illustrative example of this while teaching high 
> school biology. In the perennial struggle to cram an ever-increasing 
> curriculum into a single school year, I was trying to prioritize 
> which units to emphasize and which ones to survey quickly. I assumed 
> that much of the human body unit was redundant because all of my 
> 11th-grade biology students had taken health class. I was horrified 
> to discover that none of them had. These were city 11th-graders who 
> hadn't yet gotten a basic knowledge of how to keep themselves 
> healthy or prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted 
> pregnancies. The reason for this flagrant omission was simple: There 
> was no High School Assessment for health.
>
> Incoming freshmen must pass the tests in English, algebra, American 
> government and biology in order to graduate. Everything from the 
> morning announcements to their class schedules to the length of 
> class periods was directed toward the goal of getting them to pass 
> these four tests.
>
> School administrators are highly motivated to do this because the 
> scores are used to evaluate the schools. Funding, staffing, even the 
> future of whether some schools will exist hinges upon the scores in 
> these four areas.
>
> Students were told every day, both directly and subtly, that all 
> anyone cared about were the test scores. Weeks of valuable and 
> limited class time were taken up preparing for the tests. Students 
> were repeatedly given practice questions from previous tests. The 
> entire curriculum was designed with the goal of improving test scores.
>
> None of the higher-ups seemed terribly concerned about whether the 
> students understood the material. Topics that the test emphasized 
> were to be emphasized in class. For instance, a great deal of the 
> biology test features questions about the chemistry of living 
> things, so biology class was moved from the ninth-grade curriculum 
> to the 11th grade in order for the students to have chemistry first.
>
> Evolution is one of the most fundamental elements to understanding 
> modern biology, but only one or two questions on the biology 
> assessments were about evolution. It was consequently de-emphasized 
> in the curriculum. Classification, animal behavior, the fossil 
> record - all were given short shrift. Why? They're not on the test.
>
> I'm sure this phenomenon is not isolated to biology. Ask an algebra 
> teacher how much of the test is algebra. Ask a social studies 
> teacher which aspects of American government the test emphasizes and 
> which it omits.
>
> This type of test-driven mania calls into question the real goal of 
> education. Is it to give students a fundamental understanding of all 
> of the subjects they will need to be informed, healthy, successful 
> citizens? Or is the role of education simply to raise test scores so 
> politicians and bureaucrats will have something to brag about?
>
> John Monahan teaches science at Patterson High School in Baltimore. 
> His e-mail is gurpsman@hotmail.com.
>
>
> http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.tests11jul11,0,7447211.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines