Only two cheers for standardized testing

Teachers just don’t know what it’s for

— It’s standardized testing season, which makes me think of the late sociologist James Coleman, author of the famed Coleman Report.

Back in the 1990s, shortly before his death, I saw Coleman give the best education lecture ever. Coleman started with a simple question: why do American students work hard on the football field, but hardly work in algebra class?

Contradicting grownup complaints about lazy young people, American teens spend countless hours working on extra-curricular activities, in addition to running shopping malls, amusement parks, and most of the American fast food industry-all with relatively little grownup supervision. In short, our students work hard everywhere except school. Why?

Of course students choose football and part-time jobs while they are forced into algebra, but that’s not the most important difference. As Coleman pointed out, the same student will work hard for his coach while slacking off in his class because a teacher plays two diametrically opposed roles. A teacher both sets the standard and prepares students to meet the standard, while a coach only has to help students meet the standard set by the other team.

This means that a coach and player are on the same team, while a teacher and student are on opposing teams. Students, their parents and even principals constantly pressure teachers to lower standards. In real-world schools everyone wants academic rigor, just not for themselves. Over time, teachers find that the easiest thing to do is to get easy. After all, no one complains about homework that is never assigned.

That doesn’t work in football, because students cannot lobby their opponent’s coach to ease up. The football standard is set by the other team, which puts football players and their coach on the same team: They both want to work hard to beat the opposition.

And there is another difference. Grading within a classroom is usually a zero-sum game since not everyone can get an A. If you work hard, it makes me look bad, so serious students get punished by their peers for working harder than normal. But in football if one player works hard it helps the whole team by winning games and glory for all, so team members support each other rather than accusing standouts of being the coach’s pet.

This partly explains why the Asian and European educational systems American policy-makers admire make considerable use of standardized testing. In those systems, and in some of the better American charter schools like the KIPP academies, students and teachers unite to beat the test. If everyone does beat the test, then the whole school wins. Not coincidentally, their teachers get respect, much the way coaches do in most American schools.

I thought about this the other day when I spoke with teachers at a public school to see if they had any idea why their students had to take standardized tests. No one did. A recent college graduate told me that his well-regarded school of education never mentioned standardized testing, save for occasional griping about the No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to report test results.

To me, this marks an enormous failure of imagination, and ultimately of education policy. The standardized testing required by NCLB has succeeded in highlighting what works in schooling, and encouraging schools to celebrate and copy success. That’s worth two cheers, but not three.

The law has failed in what should have been its most important aim. NCLB has not changed the relationships between students and their teachers, because teachers have never been told how testing could professionalize their work. For our failure to explain to teachers the value of testing, policy-makers and education professors like me must share the blame.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Email him at rmaranto@uark.edu.

Perspective, Pages 78 on 04/10/2011

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