My last post was all about how wrong-headed and destructive high stakes tests are to schools, teachers and students. We need to get rid of the yearly tests. Not jigger with them. Not improve them. Not replace them with complex, multi-faceted rubrics to rank schools’ effectiveness. Get rid of them. Repeal and don’t replace.

There’s only so much we can know about education, and it’s far less than the tests pretend to tell us. Learn to live with uncertainty. It beats being certain and wrong.

We lived with uncertainty before No Child Left Behind came along fifteen years ago and created our yearly high stakes testing ritual. We’ve always argued about schools. The difference is, before NCLB, we didn’t have yearly test scores from students around the country to “prove” our point. The scores didn’t prove anything. All we learned from running those millions of data points through sophisticated computer analyses is that we can arrive at mathematically precise conclusions that are wrong four places to the right of the decimal point.

We can live with uncertainty again. We can continue to disagree about our schools on educational, political and financial grounds, using whatever arguments and data we can pull together to make our cases. But let’s not back up our claims with bad data which has been passed off by politicians as educational gospel. It cheapens and distorts the conversation, and it hurts the students.

It’s not like we won’t have any hard testing data to look at. Since the 1970s, a sampling of students across the country have taken the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) exams, also referred to as the nation’s report card, every few years. All standardized tests are flawed, but the NAEP is the best national educational measurement tool we’ve ever had. You can find educators on the right and the left citing the test results with a reasonable level of confidence. That kind of agreement doesn’t happen very often.

The NAEP is a standardized test, but it’s not high stakes like the yearly NCLB regimen. That’s a vital distinction. Teachers, schools and districts don’t rise or fall with the results.

NAEP results indicate that student achievement has gone up since the 1970s. Not by a whole lot, but the trend line is up, not down. If we accept the NAEP timeline, today’s schools are as effective as schools going back four decades, maybe even a little more effective. The tests also indicate the achievement gap between White, African American and Hispanic students has shrunk. Not as much as we might hope, but again, the trend line is positive, not negative. The results are no reason for complacency, but they contradict the “failing government schools” mantra repeated ad nauseam by the privatization/”education reform” crowd to promote its political agenda, usually using high stakes test data to “prove” the point.

The NAEP is about as close as we’re going to get to certainty. In other words, not very close.

There’s plenty of other data out there, collected over the years by researchers with greater or lesser degrees of care. It’s open-ended enough that experts use the same information to draw different conclusions. You can join in if you wish. Read the research, pick your favorite studies and draw your own conclusions. It all has one huge advantage over the yearly high stakes tests. The information is collected without subjecting millions of students to weeks of test prep and days of testing. And no reasonable person can look at it and say, “This I know for certain.”

When it comes to all things educational, the only thing I know for certain is, we can’t be certain about anything.

This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2018.

12 replies on “Oh My! Whatever Will We Do Without High Stakes Tests?”

  1. “When it comes to all things educational, the only thing I know for certain is, we can’t be certain about anything.”

    David, do you believe it’s possible to measure the performance of schools and teachers, at all? You write every day about this or that metric is flawed. Fair enough. So, how do we determine whether a particular school or particular teacher is performing more or less well that its peers? I ask because I get the impression that the government-education industry wants me to believe that it’s impossible to objectively evaluate school or teacher performance.

  2. It is so easy to criticize the efficacy of a National/State Curriculum/ Standard Assessment Examinations (AzMerit) so as to ensure Teacher/Administrator Academic Accountability by measuring if Students are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the required body of information per Subject Area necessary for them to achieve their career goals without offering alternative strategies. Principal evaluations are subjective, limited, and of no real value. Classroom instructional heterogeneity requires an objective measure.

    Teaching to the Test is a bogus argument. In fact, if the Curriculum/Assessment Examination covers the necessary body of information per Subject Area required for a Student to achieve their Career Goals, then by all mean…Teach to the Test!!!

    Local Control of Public Education (TUSD)!!!, generally, has been a dismal failure!!…hence the move, by Parents, of their Children, to Charter/Private Schools. We need to turn this around via a National/State Curriculum/Assessment Examinations like AzMerit!!

  3. Yeah….not buying it.

    Y’all must feel good that your wholesome theories about what kind of practices are to be used in THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS won the day in some of our troubled institutions locally. Unfortunately, the best of all possible worlds is not the world TUSD students have to live in. I am envisioning TUSD administrators sitting around in conference rooms in the wake of this Board decision judiciously shifting the experienced teachers into positions and grade levels where they can cover ACT cramming, and putting the long term subs covering full time teaching positions in the other grade levels. They just got a whole lot of sunlight removed from the quality of what goes on in every one of their classrooms, every year. Trujillo said as much himself. I’m guessing he knows whereof he speaks.

    True: on a hierarchy of educational practices, standardized tests are low down on the ladder in terms of desirability and sophistication. I do not like them, but if my high school kid had long term subs who had never taken courses in pedagogy or curriculum design delivering year-long sequences of English or math instruction in high school, I would certainly want the accountability structure (and curricular structure) AZMerit provides in place, for every grade level, 9, 10, 11, AND 12. A test like that, weak and lame as it is, is better than losing a year of instructional time to an “instructor” (?) who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

    You and your friends seem never to be in favor of incremental, cautious change in the right direction, David. You have a hard time envisioning that it might be possible to say things like, “Flowing Wells, given the strength of its faculty and administration, is probably in a position where it can dump AZMerit responsibly with minimal collateral damage, but TUSD is not.”

    Meanwhile, the question asked in the last comment on your last blog is still hanging, unanswered: Just how many long term, un-credentialled subs are covering secondary classrooms in TUSD right now?

  4. Sir: You failed to mention that Arizona did NOT participate in the NAEP District Performance Compared to the Nation!!!……Why? LOL

  6. Francis Saitta, sometimes I don’t mention a topic because, in the words of Rhett Butler, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn” (or enough of a damn anyway). But when you said, “Arizona did NOT participate in the NAEP District Performance Compared to the Nation,” Frankly, I didn’t know that. Can you give me a link so I can explore it? Sounds interesting.

  7. Mr. Safier: See the above. You can find School District Participation via that link….

  8. Francis, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t see a district by district analysis on the page you linked to. That’s awfully granular for a national test of a sampling of students. Have I missed something?

  9. Mr. Safier: Via that link, in addition to State Results, you should also be able to see School District Results. You will need to look for in and then select it!!!

  11. Thanks Francis, I see it now. Scattered districts around the country participated, which makes sense. A small district with a few hundred students wouldn’t have the numbers to come up with anything meaningful. The few states that participated have one or up to four (Texas) districts participating. I don’t draw any conclusions from Arizona not participating. The test sample sizes would be reasonably small at the district level, and comparing district to district isn’t going to yield much salient information. It would duplicate the sins of high stakes testing. Really, the best thing about the NAEP is that it yields big picture results which can then be sliced and diced into smaller components. I think the district level is too small. I’m not a scholar or a researcher, but I’ll bet most of them would agree.

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