Standardized Testing

Standardized Testing: What Gets Measured Gets Done

By Lisa Jancarik

My kindergartener finished her first-ever standardized tests the week that USA Today broke the story about suspicious wrong-to-right answer changes on tests in D.C.-area schools. My kid doesn’t realize yet that standardized testing is more for the adults in the education arena than it is for her, but the news stories on the topic definitely drew that point into sharp relief for me.

Michele Rhee, Arne Duncan and other Department of Education types have a problem. Their careers depend on being able to demonstrate improvement in public school education in the U.S., and it has to occur during their tenure in whatever positions they currently hold. Politicians and ivory tower-types in the DOE already have an uphill fight for public credibility, so they need some numbers they can rattle off in cable news sound bites. It’s hard to argue with data, right? The only way to build data showing where American kids stand academically is to perform standardized testing.

What Gets Measured Gets Done…So Be Careful

In business school, I had a professor who burned into my brain the mantra “what gets measured gets done.” His point, called “the Hawthorne Effect” amounts to a corollary of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and it figures heavily into what has occurred with standardized testing in schools. Specifically, tying teacher compensation to test scores turns out not to incentivize good teaching but instead to tempt “teaching to the test” or, worse, cheating on the part of adults.

The best teachers do outstanding work because they could not do otherwise, and God bless them (that’s you, Cheryl Lipko, Joe Lesko and Sam Grubich…if my kid is very lucky, a few of her teachers will do for her what you did for me). On the other hand, lousy teachers probably don’t know they are lousy or how to improve if they do. Class results of standardized tests, while potentially damning for these teachers, don’t offer any strategies for professional development.

What about the teachers who don’t care? There are plenty of folks with education degrees who are just phoning it in, like the guy I had in tenth grade who talked about sports instead of world history every period for an entire semester. This is the group we’re really talking about fixing somehow, right? If we tie teacher compensation to some milestone or performance metric, then unmotivated teachers might bring their games up enough to meet those performance goals. But just barely, and throwing money at people to get them to perform to a minimally acceptable standard seems like a waste. It’s worse than that, though, because if we offer a bonus to these path-of-least-resistance types, then we have to expect some will take the path of least resistance to achieving that bonus: cheating.

Remember Freakonomics? The book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner was published in 2005, before Michele Rhee was a national celebrity. The first essay in that book was about how the “high-stakes standardized testing” (meaning that money was tied to test scores) initiated by the Chicago Public School system in 1996 resulted in a spike in cheating by teachers. I reread that essay after the Washington, D.C. cheating story broke last month. Levitt and Dubner described teacher cheating strategies and how to spot them. Think the D.C. test scores at Rhee’s pet schools were elevated by chance or real gain? I encourage you to pull your copy of Freakonomics off the shelf before you decide. It’s pretty hard to argue with human nature, history and some readily identifiable patterns of cheating when you see them (e.g., gains that evaporate the next academic year).

So Now What, Genius?

I’ve been struggling with ideas to tie this essay up neatly. I can’t do it with a good suggestion, and that failure has meant that it wasn’t submitted weeks ago. I don’t have a plan to “fix” public education. And honestly, I only have a modicum of control over one kid’s education.

I acknowledge a certain amount of standardized testing as a necessary evil, but every politician’s stock answer for education invariably involves spending for copious testing. No one ever endorses more public funds for field trips to the museum, science center or real-world settings for math and science at work. No one ever mandates more science fairs or math projects, and the arts, history and even recess have all taken it on the chin in recent years because an “A” in art doesn’t boost those test scores (at least, not demonstrably so). It’s because the importance of doing those things isn’t readily measurable with a No. 2 pencil. Their value is too slippery for the kind of quantifiable results we crave from our educators, and more is the pity.

No one ever learned to think critically or tap into her creativity from a teacher who taught to a standardized test or put the correct answers on her bubble sheet for her. When we tightly relate budget and teacher compensation to milestones measured with these tests, we risk eroding an otherwise robust curriculum until it merely marches students through a series of practices for further testing. Of course we need to test students occasionally with standard tests, but we need to be mindful of who benefits from that testing and what we really expect to have happen before, during and after testing occurs. It’s too easy to allow politicians to treat a yardstick as a complete toolkit, and we parents need to insist that standardized testing does not become the focus of our kids’ education.

Postscript

Since I first began working on this topic, my daughter’s test scores have come back. Among her classmates’ parents, test scores were the hot topic the week or their distribution. Most parents wanted help from the school to interpret the cryptic results. I wanted to know more about the test itself: how widely used is this “national” test? How are the results used? In other words, why should I care?

The school’s director tells me that the data collected are largely for their internal use and curriculum development rather than tracking any one student’s progress. With one week of school remaining, her class’ scores won’t impact this year’s kindergarten curriculum. One mom was pleasantly surprised at how well her daughter scored in math, a subject she “hates”, so for her the results were reassuring. For the rest of the parents, however, there were few surprises. Most of us know about our kids’ reading fluency and what the daily math papers look like. I doubt any of us are losing sleep over the test.

The kindergarteners in my kid’s class remain largely in the dark about their scores, my daughter among them. Her dad and I have made the decision not to share them with her, and she hasn’t asked about them. She did well, but she gains nothing from hearing her test results. Unless we parents assign meaning to those numbers, the kids have no reason for the scores to cross their minds. Better they should head into summer thinking of swimming and biking—and sometimes reading or asking a question about the world around them—than giving those bubble sheets another thought.