High-Stakes Testing is Putting the Nation At Risk

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

Published in Education Week: March 12, 2007

Commentary


High-Stakes Testing is Putting the Nation At Risk

By David C. Berliner & Sharon L. Nichols

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President 
Bush claimed success for the federal No Child 
Left Behind Act. ?Students are performing better 
in reading and math, and minority students are 
closing the achievement gap,? he said, calling on 
Congress to reauthorize this ?good law.? 
Apparently, the president sees in No Child Left 
Behind what he sees in Iraq: evidence that his 
programs are working. But, as with Iraq, a 
substantial body of evidence challenges his claim.


We believe that this federal law, now in its 
sixth year, puts American public school students 
in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of 
empirical and theoretical work, along with 
conversations with hundreds of educators across 
the country, have convinced us that if Congress 
does not act in this session to fundamentally 
transform the law?s accountability provision, 
young people and their educators will suffer 
serious and long-term consequences. If the title 
were not already taken, our thoughts on this 
subject could be headlined ?A Nation at Risk.?

We note in passing that only people who have no 
contact with children could write legislation 
demanding that every child reach a high level of 
performance in three subjects, thereby denying 
that individual differences exist. Only those 
same people could also believe that all children 
would reach high levels of proficiency at precisely the same rate of speed.

Validity problems in the testing of 
English-language learners and special education 
students also abound, but we limit our concerns 
in this essay to the No Child Left Behind law?s 
reliance on high-stakes testing. The stakes are 
high when students? standardized-test performance 
results in grade retention or failure to graduate 
from high school. The stakes are high when 
teachers and administrators can lose their jobs 
or, conversely, receive large bonuses for student 
scores, or when humiliation or praise for 
teachers and schools occurs in the press as a 
result of test scores. This federal law requires 
such high-stakes testing in all states.

More than 30 years ago, the eminent social 
scientist Donald T. Campbell warned about the 
perils of measuring effectiveness via a single, 
highly consequential indicator: ?The more any 
quantitative social indicator is used for social 
decisionmaking,? he said, ?the more subject it 
will be to corruption pressures and the more apt 
it will be to distort and corrupt the social 
processes it is intended to monitor.? High-stakes 
testing is exactly the kind of process Campbell 
worried about, since important judgments about 
student, teacher, and school effectiveness often 
are based on a single test score. This 
exaggerated reliance on scores for making 
judgments creates conditions that promote 
corruption and distortion. In fact, the 
overvaluation of this single indicator of school 
success often compromises the validity of the 
test scores themselves. Thus, the scores we end 
up praising and condemning in the press and our 
legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.
The scores we end up praising and condemning in 
the press and our legislatures are actually 
untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.

Campbell?s law is ubiquitous, and shows up in 
many human endeavors. Businesses, for example, 
regularly become corrupt as particular indicators 
are deemed important in judging success or 
failure. If stock prices are the indicator of a 
company?s success, for example, then companies 
like Enron, Qwest, Adelphia, and WorldCom 
manipulate that indicator to make sure they look 
good. Lives and companies are destroyed as a 
result. That particular indicator of business 
success became untrustworthy as both it and the 
people who worked with it were corrupted.

Similarly, when the number of criminal cases 
closed is the indicator chosen to judge the 
success of a police department, two things 
generally happen: More trials are brought against 
people who may be innocent or, with a promise of 
lighter sentences, deals are made with accused 
criminals to get them to confess to crimes they didn?t commit.

When the indicators of success and failure in a 
profession take on too much value, they 
invariably are corrupted. Those of us in the 
academic world know that when researchers are 
judged primarily by their publication records, 
they have occasionally fabricated or manipulated 
data. This is just another instance of Campbell?s law in action.

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We have documented hundreds of examples of the 
ways in which high-stakes testing corrupts 
American education in a new book, Collateral 
Damage. Using Campbell?s law as a framework, we 
found examples of administrators and teachers who 
have cheated on standardized tests. Educators, 
acting just like other humans do, manipulate the 
indicators used to judge their success or failure 
when their reputations, employment, or 
significant salary bonuses are related to those indicators.
The law makes all who engage in compliance 
activities traitors to their own profession. It 
forces education professionals to ignore the 
testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop.

We found examples of administrators who would 
falsify school test data or force low-scoring 
students out of school in their quest to avoid 
public humiliation. We documented the distortion 
of instructional values when teachers focused on 
?bubble? kids­those on the cusp of passing the 
test­at the expense of the education of very low 
or very high scorers. We found instances where 
callous disregard for student welfare had 
replaced compassion and humanity, as when special 
education students were forced to take a test 
they had failed five times, or when a student who 
had recently suffered a death in the family was 
forced to take the test anyway.

Because so much depends on how students perform 
on tests, it should not be surprising that, as 
one Florida superintendent noted, ?When a 
low-performing child walks into a classroom, 
instead of being seen as a challenge, or an 
opportunity for improvement, for the first time 
since I?ve been in education, teachers are seeing 
[that child] as a liability.? Shouldn?t we be 
concerned about a law that turns too many of the 
country?s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?

We also documented the narrowing of the 
curriculum to just what is tested, and found a 
huge increase in time spent in test preparation 
instead of genuine instruction. We found teachers 
concerned about their loss of morale, the 
undercutting of their professionalism, and the 
problem of disillusionment among their students. 
Teachers and administrators told us repeatedly 
how they were not against accountability, but 
that they were being held responsible for their 
students? performance regardless of other factors 
that may affect it. Dentists aren?t held 
responsible for cavities and physicians for the 
onset of diabetes when youngsters don?t brush 
their teeth, or eat too much junk food, they argue.

Teachers know they stand a better chance of being 
successful where neighborhoods and families are 
healthy and communicate a sense of efficacy, 
where incomes are both steady and adequate, and 
where health-care and child-care programs exist. 
So the best of them soon move to schools with 
easier-to-teach students. This is no way to close the achievement gap.

Dozens of assessment experts have argued 
eloquently and vehemently that the high-stakes 
tests accompanying the implementation of the No 
Child Left Behind Act are psychometrically 
inadequate for the decisions that must be made 
about students, teachers, and schools. 
Furthermore, the testing standards of the 
American Educational Research Association are 
being violated in numerous ways by the use of 
high-stakes tests to comply with the law. The 
law, therefore, makes all who engage in 
compliance activities traitors to their own 
profession. It forces education professionals to 
ignore the testing standards that they have 
worked so hard to develop. We wonder, would the 
federal government treat members of the American 
Medical Association or the National Academy of Sciences with such disdain?

----------
In reauthorization hearings for the law, members 
of Congress should abandon high-stakes testing 
and replace it with an accountability system that is more reasonable and fair.

What might such a system look like?

A move to more ?formative? assessments and an 
abandonment of our heavy commitment to 
?summative? assessments would be welcome. 
Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment 
of learning, has produced some impressive gains 
in student achievement in other countries, and 
ought to be tried here. Likewise, the use of an 
inspectorate­an agency that sends expert 
observers into schools­has proved itself useful 
in other countries, and could also help improve schools in the United States.

End-of-course exams designed by teachers, as some 
states are now offering, increase teachers? 
commitment to the testing program and, if the 
teachers get to score the tests, can also be a 
great professional-development opportunity. There 
are other alternatives to high-stakes testing, as well.

Our research informs us that high-stakes testing 
is hurting students, teachers, and schools. It is 
putting the nation at risk. By restricting the 
education of our young people and substituting 
for it training for performing well on 
high-stakes examinations, we are turning America 
into a nation of test-takers, abandoning our 
heritage as a nation of thinkers, dreamers, and doers.
****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

David C. Berliner is the Regents? professor of 
education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, 
and a past president of the American Educational 
Research Association. Sharon L. Nichols is an 
assistant professor of educational psychology at 
the University of Texas at San Antonio. They are 
the co-authors of Collateral Damage: How 
High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America?s Schools, 
published this month by Harvard Education Press.

Vol. 26, Issue 27, Pages 36,48