Eight years ago next week I began my student teaching internship at Niceville High School in Niceville, Florida. Niceville won a Blue Ribbon award that year, designating it one of the state’s finest. (I’m not making that up.) Midway through the semester, I was surprised when I learned that my lesson plans would have to be discarded for the next few weeks because it was time to begin preparing the 9th graders for their next round of standardized exams. And by “preparing,” of course, I mean giving practice tests and working systematically (and in mind-numbing detail) through past reading samples — or, in a nutshell, equipping my students not with knowledge or repeatable skills but with the tricks of test-taking. That experience is one of the main reasons my career as a secondary school teacher ended before it began.
It’s also one of the main reasons I was bothered by Bush’s education platform in the 2000 campaign. After accusing Gore of instigating an “education recession” and of using “fuzzy math,” Bush proceeded to construct America’s educational system in grossly capitalist rhetoric. “All I’m saying,” he grunted in the first debate, “is, if you spend money, show us results, and test every year.” Bush then turned to his “Texas miracle” as evidence of his rightitudedness, “proving” that more standardized testing would narrow the growing gaps in white/minority results. The “Miracle” had its doubters even then, but a new study, recently released by researchers at Arizona State University, seems to have proven what every good classroom teacher has been preaching for years:
“Teachers are focusing so intently on the high-stakes tests that they are neglecting other things that are ultimately more important,” said Audrey Amrein, the study’s lead author, who says she supported high-stakes tests before conducting her research.
“In theory, high-stakes tests should work, because they advance the notions of high standards and accountability,” Amrein said. “But students are being trained so narrowly because of it, they are having a hard time branching out and understanding general problem solving.”
Perhaps most controversial, the study found that once states tie standardized tests to graduation, fewer students tend to get diplomas. After adopting such exams as a requirement for graduation, twice as many states did worse than the national graduation rate as did better. Not surprisingly, then, dropout rates worsened in 62 percent of the states, relative to the national average, while enrollment of young people in programs offering high school equivalency diplomas climbed.
The reason for this is not solely that struggling students grow frustrated and ultimately quit, the study concluded. In an echo of the findings of other researchers, the authors asserted that administrators, held responsible for raising test scores at a school or in an entire district, occasionally pressure failing students to drop out.
Here is the full report, and here is Arizona State’s press release.