This morning Google pointed me to this article: 10,000 Petition to Scrap Stats.
Teachers have mounted a campaign to end the tests and are threatening to boycott next year’s unless the government promises to end them. They say the focus on testing, and the league tables the results feed into, have narrowed the curriculum and forced teachers to teach to the test, undermining children’s learning.
The article is talking about the UK’s tests, but doesn’t this sound familiar to those of us on this side of the pond?
NEA, are you listening? Can we haz standardized test boycott, plz?
(Then again, it might just be easier to move to England. Proper health care, teacher unions organizing against standardized testing… let’s Mayflower ourselves back over there, and leave the tea-baggers here…)
2 Comments
September 18, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Having zero testing is just as bad an idea as having too much testing.
At the end of the day, America wants a way to compare students across different schools, demographics, etc. Testing is the only way to do this.
Who’s to say a teacher is doing a good job or not? I don’t think testing is the answer, but I also feel like stopping testing doesn’t answer the question either.
Lastly, I’d argue more problems in America’s education system are the result of numerous outside influences, than simply the quality of the schools and people in them.
September 18, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I don’t know what the Stats tests are, but from what the article says I’m assuming they’re like our standardized tests (here in Texas, it’s the TAKS test).
This isn’t talking about getting rid of tests and assessments (and there are many more ways to assess than to give a paper-and-pencil test); this is talking about eliminating these massive multiple-choice day-long tests that any reasonable study proves are a very poor way to assess anything. These tests have many serious flaws, many of them racist and/or classist, and therefore not an accurate assessment of the students’ achievement or ability. Also, many students are poor test takers, and these tests, especially since they are SO MONUMENTAL AND YOU WILL NOT GRADUATE AND WILL ROT IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY IF YOU DO NOT PASS, create a lot of stress and anxiety that will hinder a student’s ability to perform well on the test, even if he or she knows all the material.
There are many ways to measure the quality of a teacher’s teaching; testing students with state-mandated multiple choice exams is probably the absolutely least effective way to do this.