Week Four!

“High-stakes testing is a failure of democracy: it presents unequal structures of opportunity, it closes off inquiry, it allows the corporatization of education, it disenfranchises the people most affected by it because the public sphere is no longer available, and it creates an oppressive school environment” (Dornan 213).

Standardized tests are the black sheep of the assessment world. They are here to stay, a necessary evil in the minds of some, but many teachers (and authors such as Dornan) rant and complain about their inherent problems to no end. Many of the points discussed in the Dornan text are meant to get teachers fired up and angry about high-stakes testing, since these tests disturb the nurturing, sheltered world of the process-oriented “writer’s workshop” classroom. Though I agree with certain parts of chapter 7’s war cry against standardized tests, I think the text presents a somewhat dry and almost laughably one-sided representation of standardized tests.

I don’t know. I guess I think that endless complaining and highlighting the ills of standardized testing doesn’t do much to help our students. If Dornan is correct that “regardless of where teachers stand on the issue of high-stakes assessments, they are here to stay,” then I think we’re spinning our wheels to a certain extent by moaning and groaning about them (213). I’m not suggesting that we simply give up and turn our students into test-taking robots. I’m also not saying that informed criticisms aimed at the right audience won’t help us make assessment more relevant and appropriate for students. There has to be some compromise, however, and since these tests are indeed incredibly important for the students for college, scholarships, etc. (whether we think they should be or not), then we ought to help our students play the game and “navigate the rivers” (as Tracey would say) of the standardized testing universe.

As I was reading this chapter, I was thinking to myself, “How do I really feel about high-stakes testing? Is it really as bad as Dornan wants me to think? Are there any positives to standardized testing?” I realized that standardized tests are indeed useful in many ways that Dornan fails to mention. Sure, I prefer frequent formative assessment under the direction of the teacher (with the occasional graded summative assessment) as the best option for creating a student writing environment, but there is a need for comparative analysis between schools, districts, states, and even nations for that matter. And in that case, individualized, teacher-based assessments are a necessity. With the massive number of students in the equation at this point, performance-based, customized assessments prove to be costly for cash-strapped school districts, and in some cases machine-read tests are a more realistic alternative. They aren’t perfect and they aren’t ideal, but they may be necessary. And they’re better than having no basis of comparison on a large scale.

So, my opinion in regard to standardized tests is as follows: they serve a useful purpose, and the actual tests and test format are not ideal but they are usually not the problem. Rather, the problem is what schools, districts, states, etc. do with the results. They cannot be used to diagnose individual learning difficulties. They cannot be used as determiners of funding. They cannot be used to punish underachieving students or districts, nor should they be used as determiners of academic tracking for specific students. They cannot be used to say anything specific at all, in fact. They are too blunt of a tool for those purposes, and the fact that they are often used for those purposes is an issue that must be resolved (are you listening, Obama?). But they are, believe it or not, quite useful for seeing the big picture, comparative, overall patterns of achievement across the board. And since they “are here to stay,” as Dornan suggests, let’s see the silver lining and remind ourselves as teachers that they can be a useful tool when the results are used properly. If we have a negative attitude about standardized tests, our students will smell it a mile away, and perhaps our negative attitude will rub off on them, perhaps even impacting their performance. Let’s do our students a favor by teaching them test-taking tools and helping them play the game. Forget about Dornan’s example of Michigan teachers accused of helping students cheat on standardized exams. Giving students the skills to get through the stressful challenge of a lengthy standardized test is a worthwhile cause, and we should not shrug off this task simply because we aren’t fans of the testing system.

My resource link is: http://www.folger.edu/index_sa.cfm?specaudid=2

It is a must-see if you are ever planning on teaching Shakespeare...so basically for all of us. It is the website of the publisher of the Folger edition of Shakespeare. They have a ton of lesson plans, resources, etc. All kinds of good stuff.