Those with a mind for controversy or whimsy may recall the outrage last year over a certain talking pineapple on the New York State eighth-grade reading exam. The unfortunate pineapple passage was sliced, diced, and served up as an example of all that is wrong with standardized testing. Asking students to inhabit the shared mental landscape of some chatty anthropomorphized forest animals and tropical fruit, as the questions did, was deemed both ridiculous and unfair. The author of the excerpted passage criticized the exam’s adaptation of his story as “barely literate.” And the state quickly announced that it would not count on the test’s scoring.
And so the talking pineapple joined the long tradition of conflict and contention over educational reform in America, from Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary plan for public education in Virginia, to the Texas State Board of Education’s recent demotion of Jefferson from its ranks of revolutionary thinkers. The current obsession with testing (and pineapples) belongs to the standards movement, which began in the nineteen-eighties. Now, one of its more unusual battles is being fought in Seattle, where, in December, teachers at Garfield High School voted to boycott the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam.
The Garfield teachers are not boycotting all standardized tests. Their complaints, as outlined by Kris McBride, the school’s testing coördinator, are focussed squarely on the MAP, which, as an assessment tool, can be categorized as a low-stakes test: according to the MAP-makers at the N.W.E.A., it is an “interim assessment.”
That low-stakes status is precisely the problem, as far as the Garfield teachers are concerned. McBride writes that the students know the test doesn’t affect their grades or class standing, so they don’t invest much effort in it. And because it is an externally developed assessment, which the teachers say largely fails to align with district and state standards (N.W.E.A. disputes this point), there is no preparation for it. In sum, students are taking an exam that doesn’t really count, on material that may or may not be relevant, and producing results that may have nothing to say about them or their future. If you subscribe to the notion that education is preparation for life, then these students have received their first primer on the soul-crushing routines of bureaucracy.
But even though the results are meaningless to the students, this year the Seattle Public Schools began using the tests as a part of the evaluation of its teachers. According to the Wall Street Journal, MAP results and state-achievement-exam scores are used to generate teacher ratings. Low ratings call for additional observations from the principal, and the eventual possibility that the teacher will lose his or her job.
This scrambling of incentives is one of the ways standardized tests can be misused, but it may not be the most damaging. Let’s return to the much-maligned pineapple, which, headlines aside, may not be beyond redemption. Even if it missed the mark, the pineapple passage at least attempted to introduce some levity into the serious matter of high-stakes exams. Its questions also required some “higher order thinking,” and prompted a genuine educational conversation, in which various arguments were advanced or refuted by students, parents, educators, and the broader vested community. This is pretty sophisticated stuff.
The irony of the pineapple question is that its greatest value—the academic discussion it generated—couldn’t be measured by the test itself. One of the most prominent themes to emerge in the press coverage of the controversy was that students could easily err if they were to “overthink” the questions. The logical approach in preparing for such exams, then, is to caution students to not burden themselves with an overabundance of thought. Such council is, no doubt, wise in matters of love and basketball, but if there’s any environment in which extended deliberation ought to be encouraged, it’s the classroom.
And so the MAP brings us to the very point at which teaching and testing have diverged. When students are forced to take an exam like the MAP two or three times a year so that they can be better prepared for other, more important exams, the assessment is no longer a partner to curriculum. The assessment has become the curriculum. The MAP, and tests like it, are pushing schools past the clichéd, bemoaned exercise of “teaching to the test,” to a curriculum that simply is the test. And while the exams may be a thoroughly vetted, sophisticated means of measurement, they are an inadequate, constricted form of expression. As the author and relapsed educator Garret Keizer observed in his return to teaching, of which he writes in the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, “No student I meet seems to believe that the universe formed in six days but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs.”
Whether or not a five-paragraph, multiple-choice view of the world is a classroom accomplishment or a lament depends on your view of teaching. Testing skeptics believe that teachers need a certain degree of professional autonomy to be effective. They worry about the blind faith placed in tests, and wonder if creativity must be a casualty of competency. But if you fear that teachers can be a weak link in education, liable to hold students back, then standards and tests shore up the system. David F. Labaree, a professor of education at Stanford, has written about how linking teachers’ evaluations to their students’ performances assures that the reformers’ policies, curriculum, and standards make their way through the classroom door. According to this philosophy, the marginalization of teachers is necessary to raise the floor for students.
In this context, then, the MAP exams do matter. They are another means of enforcing reforms. At the end of February, despite support for the boycott from Garfield’s student and parent organizations—pretty much the school’s entire community—the Seattle district compelled administrators to carry out the exam and, according to the teachers, threatened “consequences.” Raising the floor is a laudable aim, no doubt, but it’s futile if it also weakens a school’s foundation of motivated, professional educators.
Today’s standards-bearing reformers mean well. Their goal of increasing achievement for all students is commendable. But the exams they employ reflect the limits of the reformers’ approach: they see a single solution to the problems of education and grade everyone accordingly. That the best solution for any student, teacher, or class, on any given day, may be “none of the above” is not acceptable. And the matter is not open to discussion.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
