America’s obsession with testing our children every year on the national or state levels brings Einstein’s words on insanity to life: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The United States has been hyper-testing our children for twelve years (the start of No Child Left Behind was in 2002) and we keep getting the same results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): steady average in reading and science and below average in math. Although our scores have remained stagnant, “our ranking,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics, “is slipping because a lot of these other countries are improving.”
What do the top scorers such as Finland do with respect to testing? They test a child only once during their K-12 experience. The Finnish have a word for our testing obsession: hullu (insane or crazy). I argue that we have subscribed to “hullu-plus” over the last twelve years.
While other countries have increased their PISA results, the only results with any significant increase that the United States is experiencing are in cheating scandals. Simply pick up any reputable American newspaper during the past week and you will see headlines stating “Cheating Probe Roils Philadelphia School System” and “Ohio School District Hit by Cheating Allegations.” With the jobs of teachers and administrators increasingly being tied to testing scores, do you think that instances of cheating will go up or down?
A main reason we keep testing is not for of any educational, logical or sane reason but for the power of certain lobbies. In my state of Connecticut, for instance, the number one spender on lobbying is a corporate education reform group called A Better Connecticut. While A Better Connecticut spent $2.3 million in 2013, the combined total spent by all the lobbying groups on both sides of the gun policy debate was $556,149 (the year immediately following the Sandy Hook tragedy). Follow the money and an understanding of why we keep testing our children “over and over again and expecting different results” becomes perversely clear. While I believe that the Common Core State Standards are necessary in the United States for many reasons (i.e., spend one afternoon in a suburban classroom and the next in an urban schoolroom and you will see at least 18-40 reasons sitting in the seats), the hyper-testing that began with No Child Left Behind should be abandoned because it is at its best “stagnating” the education of our children while inflating the bottom lines of corporate educators (i.e., businesses that make money off of testing and charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded).
I recommend a middle ground between what we are doing now with testing and what Finland does. My suggestion is to test only in 5th, 8th and 12th grades. These are key transition years in educational development and our emphasis should be on testing how well the system of education works for our children and not how well our children work for the system. In other words, by testing every year we have placed the pressure of evaluating our educational system on our children and not on the system we created. Our country’s educators are focused on teaching to their respective yearly test (something they do not want to do but have to because of our hyper-testing obsession) and not to any broader or deeper educational goals. Somewhere over the last two decades in the United States we conflated testing with educating to the point where we have promoted teaching (to the test) over learning in our classrooms.
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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