Oh boy. Standardized testing. Every teacher’s favorite thing in the whole wide world.
Not.
I don’t think it comes as a surprise to find out that standardized testing is almost universally disliked by educators, students, parents, administrators…to be honest, it’s rare to actually hear someone in-person genuinely say they like testing.
There’s good reason for that. A quick look at news outlets around the country will show you that standardized testing comes with many, many issues, from hurting students with learning disabilities, adding even more anxiety to a youngster’s mind, and forcing teachers to ‘teach to the test.’
So if this thing is almost universally hated and appears to cause more problems than it actually resolves…why are we still doing it? To answer this, I’m going to take us back in time – we’ll analyze how this whole mess got started to begin with, why we’re still dealing with this issue today, and how we can try to move forward. Ready? Let’s go!
How It Started
A bit of a history lesson here. Go aaaaaaaaall the way back to 1965, to a man who was then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. President Johnson was fighting a War on Poverty, creating a sweeping set of reforms programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, all aimed at improving the living conditions of those who lived in impoverished areas. The Cold War was raging, and the United States was terrified of falling behind the Soviet Union. President Johnson looked at the current education system, which was still trying (unsuccessfully) to desegregate. Something needed to be done.
On April 11, 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was signed into law. Among other things, this legislation:
- Passed Title I, which aims to distribute funding to districts and schools with large percentages of low-income families.
- Provide funds that enhanced teacher education programs around the country
- Provide more funding to state and local education departments
That’s a gross oversimplification, but you get the gist: the point was to boost America’s education system nationwide. Within a few years, additional programs aimed at aiding students with disabilities and bilingual students were created and tacked on to ESEA. It is the largest piece of federal legislation affecting public education, and came with many, many positive impacts.
A fun fact about ESEA: nowhere in the original 32-page document did it mandate high-stakes standardized testing. Nowhere! So, then, what does this piece of legislation have to do with standardized testing? Well…
ESEA did not mandate high-stakes testing, but it did encourage it. Essentially, the ESEA encouraged states to implement programs that measured student growth and effectiveness by providing them with the funds to do so. It never said that states had to implement such programs, but…free money, am I right?
The 1970s saw a rise in states with standardized testing programs, though many of these were not high-stakes (meaning that it did not prevent students from graduating if they failed) or were not required to take. States like Texas didn’t implement a statewide program until 1980, a whole 15 years after the original passing of the ESEA. What changed?
In short, state and federal governments were getting wary of giving money away to school districts, and wanted a concrete way to measure whether a district or campus was actually using that money effectively. Throughout the 80s and 90s, state testing was expanding across the nation, culminating in the Big Bad that sleeps under every teacher’s bed:
No Child Left Behind
No Child Left Behind was a significant alteration to Title I in the ESEA: it dramatically increased accountability for both teachers and students, forced districts to release a yearly report card, and required schools to have a restructuring plan if they failed to meet the minimum requirements. In theory, it was supposed to be a good thing, forcing failing schools to straighten up and whipping the American education system back into place.
In theory.
In reality, it spurred on new waves of yearly standardized testing. Students went from an average of taking just 1-2 standardized tests a year to taking anywhere between 10-15 tests, spending upwards of 20-40 hours a year in a testing environment. That’s a lot.
It also didn’t have much of a positive impact on the American education system as a whole. Many districts and campuses that had been succeeding quite well before NCLB actually started failing, falling under the strict new regulations the legislation enforced. Schools that were already struggling buckled under the increased pressure. Overall, reports of teacher and student burnout increased, and the United States was not magically becoming the beacon of public education like NCLB had promised.
How Are We Still Here?
Since NCLB, another law has passed: the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It was designed to lessen some of the stringent requirements put on by NCLB and gave more control over to the states for education. In theory, a good thing! Unfortunately, it kept some requirements for high-stakes testing.
Why is that? If we’ve seen that these sorts of programs aren’t successful, and don’t actually improve education systems overall, then why are we still bothering with this antiquated system?
The short answer: money.
The long answer: money, money, money!
Since the 1980s – and especially since the passing of NCLB – companies have really started to make bank from what can easily be called the standardized testing industry. For example, the state of Texas just this year agreed to pay two companies – Cambium Assessment and Pearson – a total of $388 million over the next four years to manage and develop their statewide STAAR examinations. Back in 2005, when NCLB mandates were becoming properly implemented, Pearson pulled in nearly $900 million in state contracts, accounting for more than half of the nation’s testing contracts. These companies make a killing by creating, managing, and scoring the standardized tests, and ensure that they get to keep their contracts through intense amounts of lobbying.
Where Do We Go Now?
Reading this all can feel a little disheartening. After all, it seems like testing companies just have state and federal education agencies under their thumb. But while that was certainly true two decades ago, there are some signs of change.
For starters, Pearson has had to pay states back for some pretty hefty failures – $7.7 million to New York in 2013, $15 million to Florida in 2010, and $5 million to Wyoming. In addition to those large fines, some states have begun reducing contracts with testing companies, deciding that the money might be better spent elsewhere. The passing of ESSA in 2015 provided leeway in how states assess their students and districts, allowing for states to ease the burden of high-stakes testing. More research into alternative methods of has been done in recent years, and the results are promising.
So…is standardized testing going away any time soon?
Unfortunately, no – the amount of money still being funneled into the high-stakes testing industry is just too much for it to completely back down. With a need for statewide/national accountability systems, it is unlikely that standardized testing will be going away any time soon.
What can happen, however, is an increase in accountability for the companies responsible for these mandatory, high-stakes testing environments. Questions ought to be raised about the millions of dollars funneled into these companies despite numerous failures to sometimes even administer the test to begin with. States can implement policies that shift focus away from testing and towards alternative methods of accountability.
There are ways to assess and hold districts accountable without forcing students to spend dozens of hours each school year testing. We just have to look for them.
Jacob Ryckman 