Fwd: Berliner & Nichols on High-Stakes Testing

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

  From: James Crawford <jwcrawford@COMPUSERVE.COM>

  Date: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:08:51 AM US/Pacific

  To: ELLADVOC@asu.edu

  Subject: Berliner & Nichols on High-Stakes Testing

  Reply-To: James Crawford <jwcrawford@COMPUSERVE.COM>

  [This oped summarizes Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts
  America’'s Schools, by Nichols & Berliner, just published by Harvard
  Education Press. I haven't finished the book yet, but based on the early
  chapters, would highly recommend it.]

  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.

  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.

  ***

  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.

  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” kids—those on the cusp of passing the test—at
  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 inspectorate—an agency that sends expert observers
  into schools—has 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.