Edumication

Andrew Raff
May 22, 2001

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''President George W. Bush, Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

I agree with very few of the current Presidents policies; particularly with regards to the need for ballistic missile defense, energy policy, the giant tax cut, and, well, the list goes on. Most of the Bush Administrations early policies do not reflect our national interest on a broad scale. There is however, one giant exception. The president has stated that education will be the top priority of his administration and it is one cause that Bush seems genuinely passionate about.

The Bush education plan even increases federal funding for education. This is a great step forward for a Republican Party whose previous presidential candidates had proposed eliminating the department of education. Unfortunately, one central aspect of the Bush plan troubles me. That part is not vouchers, which has already been scrapped as the element that could never pass through the Congress, but rather, the call for mandatory testing every year for students between third and eighth grades. Now, testing in and of itself is not a bad concept in education, since without evaluation it is impossible to gauge student progress. Evaluation must be a central component of education. However, federally mandated, standardized testing, as outlined in the Bush plan is a bad idea.

Currently, school districts and states use standardized testing as a way to measure student performance and as a way of judging the effectiveness of teachers and their methods. Unfortunately, these tests are being used as the only metric of evaluation. Teachers are being graded only on how many of their students pass such tests. Schools have their funding tied to how well or poorly students do on standardized tests. Not surprisingly, these tests are far from perfect. The New York Times is running an excellent two part series this week about the problems in the standardized testing industry. These tests are not as perfect and accurate as they are made out to be by policy makers.

When standardized tests are given as an integral part of the promotion/graduation requirement, the amount of useful learning in the classroom can only decrease. While needing to pass an all-important test will force students to study harder, it will also diminish the learning process. Teachers will spend more time teaching to the test, so that students will learn how to take the test, rather than how to use and apply the subject matter. Popular standardized test preparatory courses, like The Princeton Review and Kaplan, are focused on the testing process, rather than reinforcing the basic and specific skills necessary to do well on the exam. When I took a Princeton Review SAT course, the focus of the class was on tactics that can help one answer the multiple choice question correctly without actually knowing the answer. Test-taking strategy is as important as actual knowledge with these tests. The more important that testing becomes as the criterion for school evaluation, the more time is spent teaching how to take tests, rather than how to actually employ critical thinking skills and subject knowledge for constructive reasons.

In New York, when new 4th grade exit exams became part of the curriculum, teachers spent months teaching their students how to take the test, and assigned homework that rested on the context of the test. Instead of teaching the students to love reading or to read books, classroom time was spent on how to best take an all-important multiple choice exam. In reaction, parents in Scarsdale, NY are having their children boycott the exams as a protest against high-stakes testing.

The federal Department of Education should be working to create stronger cirriculae, but should not be involved in developing standardized year-end exit tests. As an alternative, the whole of each districts programs and evaluations should be held accountable. School districts should be graded not on the results of a single test by its students, but by a range of factors. Increased federal spending should be going towards making sure that teachers and administrators are well paid enough to attract qualified people back into education. Money should go to perform holistic evaluations of school districts and give teachers and principals the tools to evaluate the progress of their students and actually teach the students effectively. Unless the all-too-meager funds for education in this country are spent wisely, we will end up with a group of students who are able to do little more with their knowledge than "pass a literacy test."