The resistance movement against the abuse and misuse of standardized testing has exploded across the nation, the Washington Post reports on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog. The resistance will continue to grow as the testing season heads into the final stretch, writes guest blogger Monty Neill, director of FairTest.
The essential core of any reasonable protest movement contains the following three tenets:
- Stop high-stakes use of standardized tests
- Reduce standardized testing to save time and money for real learning
- Replace multiple-choice tests with performance-based assessments and evidence of learning from students’ ongoing classwork
The question is, How can protesters turn these demands into productive calls for action on the part of elected state and federal representatives?
The reason I have never supported the opt-out movement is that it seems to be a protest against the public schools. People walk on picket lines, carrying signs, in front of public schools. Kids walk out of testing sessions being conducted in public school classrooms. When parents write letters opting their children out of standardized tests, the letters are addressed to officials at the public schools. So, therefore, I consider opting out a protest against the public schools.
April 17, 2013: Kids, parents, and teachers did a play-in at Chicago Public Schools headquarters to show the importance of play and to protest the excessive number of standardized tests required in kindergarten (14). (sarah-ji via Flickr)
But here’s what’s wrong with that: school officials can’t do anything about the number or quality of the standardized tests they have to give students. All they can do is follow the law. There is a federal law that mandates the administration of certain standardized tests, and school officials are not—repeat, not—going to break the law on purpose.
The law needs to be changed, and I would bet dollars to donuts that every single teacher agrees with the protesters that kids are over-tested and that the high stakes some of these standardized tests have for our students and for our schools are just inappropriate. That is, in addition to protesting against people who can’t do anything about the situation because their hands are tied by federal law, opting out is also like a minister preaching to the church choir.
All protests do is disrupt life at the school, because all the people who are in the school (a) agree with the protesters on the fundamental points listed above, and (b) have to follow the law.
What should happen is for protesters to take their case to Washington or to statehouses. Those are the people who can actually change the law. Teachers and other people in the schools have been telling them to change No Child Left Behind and the high-stakes standardized testing for several years now, probably since about 2007. But there’s no real pressure on elected officials to change the law and money keeps flowing into their re-election campaigns from testing companies and standardized test publishers.
Mr Neill lays out the case very nicely, including the listing of a few action items protesters need to follow:
- Get school districts to reduce the number of standardized exams they require on top of federal and state mandates (e.g., “benchmark” tests). They should also end high-stakes uses of exams for purposes such as grade promotion
- Get states to eliminate testing requirements that are not federally mandated and drop high school graduation exams
- Change federal law to require statewide tests only once each in elementary, middle, and high school, as recently introduced legislation will do
- If the tests are truly “reliable,” then random sampling of students will be adequate, rather than testing every single child
- Test scores should not be the basis for punitive actions against schools; genuine assistance must replace punishment
- The federal government has to end its requirement that states evaluate teachers “in significant part” on student scores in order to receive waivers to NCLB
If protesters can take some of the energy they have shown against the public schools and direct it toward state and federal education and elected officials, we might actually get testing right. Once bad assessment is out of the way, we can talk about other reforms, which are in and of themselves basically good but in need of amendment, such as the Common Core State Standards.
