The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better

We’ve been very clear about our distaste and criticism of the Common Core testing (SBAc and PARCC). We’ve also warned that iReady and other testing systems are used less to help students and more for administrators and school boards and State Superintendents and States and the Federal government to have numbers to use to control the flow of money. Money controls choices and actions. In the end all the testing does little to help, adds stress and pressure without helping the students improve.

Enter a new book titled “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better” published August 21st 2017. The author is Daniel Koretz. Dan is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.

Following is a review of the book. We borrowed this from Phelps Gates’ review at Amazon. We hope you enjoy it and decide to share your thoughts.

https://www.amazon.com/Testing-Charade-Pretending-Schools-Better/dp/022640871X

This is a book that belongs in the hands of everybody involved in planning for the public schools and (especially) in the hands of legislators. The author warned, decades ago, of the pitfalls inherent in schemes such as No Child Left Behind and its slightfully-improved successor ESSA, the cheerfully-named “Every Student Succeeds Act.” To his credit, he doesn’t say “I told you so!” but he certainly could have. The mania for testing may have produced slight (and possibly illusory) improvements in some areas of math education. But this doesn’t make up for the enormous damage that’s taken place: test prep replacing actual education… neglect of things not tested on, like science, history, music, even recess… out-and-out cheating… What a mess!

Koretz goes into details on exactly how things went so wrong. A good deal of statistical analysis is unavoidable in a book like this, but he leads the reader helpfully through it by the hand, and there’s nothing here that would give trouble to the uninitiated. One of the things he discusses is “score inflation”: increases in test scores often show not that students have learned more, but that educators have learned to game the system more effectively, to artificially boost their students’ scores. Their ingenious strategies would be entertaining to read about if this didn’t reflect a tragedy inflicted on kids.

The book discusses “Campbell’s Law” at length: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” This was a new one to me, but it’s remarkably insightful: the author explains how this relates to things as diverse as the VW emissions scandal, Soviet-era factory quotas, and, of course, the misuse of standardized testing that has corrupted the educational system.

The book ends with positive suggestions on how to make things better, taking cues from the educational systems in other countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, and Singapore. These countries are all different in the approaches they take to improving education, and we can learn a lot from any of them. Alas, I’m not optimistic about any serious reforms taking place in the American educational establishment, given the political climate of defensiveness that gets aroused by criticism of the current crop of “reformers.” Sadly, I suspect we have lost an entire generation of students, but perhaps in a few years people will be fed up enough to make real changes.

Consider sharing the link to this book with your legislators, school board and school district superintendent.