President's Viewpoint

Challenging the Almighty Test

Teachers and parents must join forces and
put the standardized test in its place.

In Scarsdale, New York about a hundred parents of eighth graders held their children out of school during testing. In Louisiana a group of parents has filed a civil rights complaint against the state's high-stakes test system. In Virginia, parents have organized a statewide association against the commonwealth's high-stakes standardized tests.

Parents in Montgomery County, Maryland blistered school members' ears last spring when their eighth-grade children spent 50 hours in testing (on one district-mandated test, two state tests). Some parents in northern California have even printed up bumper stickers that declare: "High-Stakes Are For Tomatoes."

Nationwide, a recent public opinion poll done by Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup, a nonpartisan organization, shows serious erosion of parental support for testing over the past five years. A growing number of parents now think that too much emphasis is being placed on tests.

The basic problem, of course, is that states from California to Massachusetts have botched their testing programs. In the name of "accountability," politicians have rushed to impose high-stakes standardized tests-ignoring the warnings of testing experts in both academia and publishing who oppose the use of a standardized test as the sole factor in determining a student's knowledge.

Harcourt Educational Measurement, for example, offers this warning to states using its popular Stanford Achievement Test: "Test scores may certainly enter into a promotion or retention decision. However, they should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude."

Together, I believe that parents and educators can restore sanity and common sense to student assessment. Testing is an indispensable tool of our teacher's trade. However, to tie education reform to the single goal of raising test scores may seem like a good idea atop Mount Olympus, where no children live, but in the real world, it has produced a rash of negative and unintended consequences.

There is mounting evidence, for instance, that high-stakes tests in states such as Texas are spurring a dramatic rise in dropout rates, especially among black and Hispanic students. In addition, high-stakes tests are driving good teachers right out of the profession. One teacher E-mailed me last spring: "It is not the lousy pay that's making me leave teaching. It's the unrelenting pressure to raise scores on a single, multiple-choice test. I didn't become a teacher to be a test-preparation drill sergeant." Unfortunately, I have received all too many such letters over the past year.

But the negative effects of high-stakes tests don't end there. Under pressure to raise test scores, some school systems have trimmed-or even eliminated-recess, field trips, the arts and music, science and social studies (when not on the test), and physical education. A recent headline says it all: "Area Schools Tailoring Curricula to State Tests."

Parents and teachers must make politicians understand that there is a world of difference between using a test as a stethoscope, to diagnose which children need extra help, and using it as a sledgehammer, to determine winners and losers among our children and our schools.

Comments? E-mail Bob Chase at BobChase@nea.org.