Educators and students are taking a stand against high stakes tests. This issue of TCLA reports on their experiences and the evidence that these tests undermine learning, harm students, and exacerbate racial and economic inequality. Teaching to Change LA joins these activists in arguing for all students to have authentic and appropriate assessments of their learning--assessments that would A) Allow students to demonstrate their competence in meaningful and authentic tasks and skills; B) Give teachers information about students' learning so that they can design the best lessons and provide targeted support; C) Communicate to parents and students about student progress towards academic goals.
California's testing program does not serve these purposes. The Stanford-9 (SAT-9) is an "off the shelf" test that does not match California's content standards. This means that students must learn the official curriculum and then, in addition, learn to score well on the test. The special test preparation all schools are forced to emphasize takes away from what students are really supposed to learn. In a recent study of testing across 18 states, David Berliner of Arizona State University suggests that tests such as the SAT-9 encourage wasteful "test preparation" in order to promote higher scores. The study also exposes the practice of excluding low-scoring students from the data in order to show higher scores.
Unfortunately, the high-stakes tests do more that waste time and show phony "gains" in student learning. The State also proposes to punish students who do not pass the High School Exit Exam. Even worse, the punishment will fall most heavily on students who attend schools that most lack the instructional materials and qualified teachers necessary to score well on the tests. The State knows that these are the very schools attended by disproportionately large numbers of low-income students of color. Yet California proceeds--thinking that denying diplomas to students who have the fewest educational advantages will somehow "motivate" schools and students to do better. The activists highlighted in this issue of Teaching to Change LA point us toward strategies for reconstructing the role of assessment in education. These strategies begin by reclaiming the purposes of authentic assessment and then removing the high stakes consequences from assessment. For them, the goal is not simply new assessments, but a system that provides quality education for all.
John Rogers
Associate Director, UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA)
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