Let’s finally be done with high stakes testing

Let’s finally be done with high stakes testing and the accountability charade that gets wrapped around it every year.

Accountability requires the truth to work. If you tell me I’m effective or ineffective and that’s the truth I can improve. If you’re wrong, however, you’ll do more harm than good. You’ll put me at risk of changing what may not need to be changed and not changing what should.

Accountability in organizations is no different. Only the truth about both the good and the bad allows for meaningful improvement.

The public school system is perhaps the most important of our public institutions when it comes to the future of this country and the preservation of our democracy. If it fails, we fail. Of all our institutions that must account for and be accountable for the truth, schools are paramount. Which means they must have the truth.

Which, since the era of test-based accountability began, has not existed. This may come as a surprise to most, but the tests states use in what they name but is not accountability tell us nothing on their own about a school’s effectiveness or quality. This is because they were never designed nor intended to do that. The assumption that they can magically become what they are not is both old and wrong.

It stems from a simple but harmful bias. Which is easy to see if you understand what the research instrument we know as standardized testing allows us to see. You can get a sense of that if you think about the amount of mathematical knowledge possessed by a large group of eighth graders on any given day. We know those eighth graders will possess very different levels of knowledge and studying the reasons and patterns why would create real opportunities to make improvements.

One of the largest contributors to the differences in mathematical knowledge will be the cumulative years of exposure lifetime to date. For the most part, eighth graders will have similar amounts of exposure in school, but the non-school exposure will vary wildly. Even the non-school exposure during their current school year will vary wildly.

The most significant contributor to this variation will be the socioeconomics affecting each child’s life. Those from wealthier conditions are likely to have far greater non-school exposure than those from poorer conditions, and as such on a single date during eighth grade that will be reflected in an analysis of the amount of knowledge possessed.

Let me clear, the differences observed would have nothing to say about who is smarter, whether the school is effective or ineffective, the quality of a teacher, etc. Some students are smarter than others, some schools are effective and some ineffective, and some teachers are better than others, but that can’t be seen in this type of analysis.

If someone made the tragic mistake of thinking the results of such an analysis were an indicator of quality, that would mean they would be guilty of assigning labels of success or failure without knowing that was the case. And if the schools were made to act on these labels in an accountability environment, schools would be acting on a set of untruths. It would make them worse, not better.

Worse still, it would be virtually guaranteed to assign labels of failure to schools in poor communities for being in poor communities, and labels of success to schools in wealthy communities for being in wealthy communities. The nonsense in that would be stunning.

This nonsense is exactly what test-based accountability does. It takes an analytical tool that allows us to see something worth seeing, worth understanding, and worth acting on, and uses it to make imaginary judgments that just so happen to align with one of societies longest held biases: that schools in poor communities are bad and schools in wealthy communities are good. The correlation of the negative judgments to where large numbers of our minority citizens live, and the disproportionately negative impact that creates, should not be lost upon us.

And because the system as it is designed—whether intentionally or not is not the point—makes schools less effective, especially those judged negatively, the effect is both to preserve the bias and give it a reason to exist.

I can assure you, as someone who works every day with public schools on this issue of building meaningful accountability systems, that every school is effective in some ways and ineffective in others, and that with the truth they can all improve. And I can assure you that there are effective schools the state labels as failures and ineffective schools the state applauds as successful merely because of their addresses.

That, I can also assure you, hurts and damages the public educational system in ways we cannot afford. It squanders talent, harms students and communities, and puts our future at risk. The effect is the most hurtful among our most vulnerable.

An industry leader I know once commented to me that any other profession or industry would have collapsed under the weight of such conditions. The fact that public education perseveres in its mission in spite of all this, he said, is a remarkable testament to the men and women who serve it.

Just imagine if the time and energy spent fighting a bad system in order to do what is right for our children could all be dedicated to doing what is right for our children. It is a good thing to think.

Accountability won’t go away when test-based accountability dies, but it will be different. It will need to be disciplined, student and community focused, and most critically based in the truth. Arguments like mine against high stakes testing are really just calls for a true educational accountability. For the truth about our schools.

High stakes testing should be done away with this year, next year, and for as far into the future as any of us can imagine. It doesn’t tell us the truth, it prolongs and intensifies biases that hurt us as a society, and most embarrassing of all, it can’t, by design, do what it purports to do.