My students finished taking nine standardized tests over the past two weeks. It was eleven total hours of testing. During this time of inane banality, my job becomes one of scutwork. As a testing proctor, I diligently pace around my classroom ensuring that all of my students are quiet and focused on their own computer screens. I collect cell phones and pass out scratch paper and testing tickets. I read the scripted directions verbatim over and over and over again. I monitor the clock. When I see a student begin to falter, I quickly encourage her to “keep going” and “do your best” so that she is sure to finish the test within the 90 minutes allotted for English Language Arts and 65 for math and science. I give my students mints during the test to boost their focus. After each testing session, I pass out apple sauce packets, popcorn, grapes, or oranges, anything healthy to feed their Takis®-addicted brains. I take students outside to let them run around, stretch their legs, and most importantly, according to the numerous signs plastered in the hallways, make the noise they are not allowed to make indoors.
There is much schoolishness during standardized testing.
In her book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, Dr. Susan D. Blum Muses defines schoolishness as “the characteristic of being made for, by, and about school.” She enumerates:
not real, not from “the real world,” but for the self-contained world of closed-off institutions, with their own logic, grammar, rules
a form of being that emphasizes packaged “learning,” teaching, orderly progressions, uniformity, evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, artificial boundaries, postponing rewards and use. The reading is finite, the writing has specific rules, and the tests have tricks to sort out those who have mastered the techniques of figuring them out. There are correct answers, and someone knows them. The success is preestablished, the norms are bell-curve-like, and the standards are universal.
rhymes with foolishness
During the weeks of standardized testing, teachers are expected to dictate where students sit, the scratch paper they use, how long they test, how much noise they make; we even control what students are allowed to do after testing (only silent reading or resting one’s head on their desk). Standardized testing time is a boring time for students and teachers. While I refuse to do much in the way of test preparation or “teaching to the test,” I do warn my students about how much the adults in the building will change during this time. Everyone, myself included, transforms from a teacher to a testing proctor: stress levels are high, patience is at an all-time low. There is no room for misbehavior for fear of invalidating these norm-referenced tests.
The hypothetical “norm” or average my students are testing against is the “average” fifth-grader. When their results arrive sometime next fall, parents will compare their child’s scores against other fifth-graders in the state. Score reports will indicate their child’s score and percentile ranking. Colorful bar graphs will show if they met expectations, exceeded expectations, or are sorted into one of the two more challenging categories to explain to parents: partially met expectations and approached expectations.
And while none of these scores will ever directly impact my students’ academic lives, according to Blum, they “simply exist within the schoolish universe.” Standardized tests are commonplace in schools, so prevalent that very few question why we continue to give such imperfect measures of students’ success. In a perfect world, tests should be reliable (consistent across assessors and times taken), valid (accurate measure of the intent), precise, and fair. Dr. Susan D. Blum, Professor of Anthropology at The University of Notre Dame, explains:
The more ‘reliable’ [tests] are, with consistent results from subsequent iterations by the same or different teachers or evaluators, the less ‘valid’ they tend to be in terms of actually measuring what people should have learned. It’s easy to test for facts and information, and appeals to the need for ‘rigor’ and ‘objectivity’ lead to testing manageable chunks of information. It’s harder to test for application of principles, generation of new knowledge, or asking new questions.
Not only do standardized test have cultural and linguistic bias, they primarily measure a student’s test-taking skills, speed, and vocabulary, instead of a deep understanding of academic content. I see it play out at the beginning of every school year. Students come to me with inaccurate beliefs about their intelligence because of test scores.
And so, every spring, my scutwork continues.
Despite knowing that standardized tests are not real measures of my students’ abilities, and are often harmful to my students self-esteem and mental health, I continue to administer them and encourage my students to do their best. I tell them that their scores do not define them or matter much in the real world outside of school, and yet, bribe them with candy if they use their scratch paper and entire allotted time. Teaching, especially during this time of year, is trying to navigate such incongruities. I feel simultaneously emboldened about protesting standardized testing and helpless to act in accordance with my values. During these last two weeks, I was surrounded by absurd schoolishness, but powerless to challenge the status quo. I did nothing in service of my students’ learning, and as such, become schoolish myself.
“Not everything that matters can be quantified. What is tested may ultimately be less important than what is untested, such as a student's ability to seek alternative explanations, to raise questions, to pursue knowledge on his own, and to think differently. If we do not treasure our individualists, we will lose the spirit of innovation, inquiry, imagination, and dissent that has contributed powerfully to the success of our society in many different fields of endeavor.”
— Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Have a great week!
— Adrian
Standardized Testing is Still Failing Students | NEA Today
NEA Today discusses an alternative to standardized testing: Performance-Based Assessments (PBAs). Although Blum does not directly address PBA as a less-schoolish alternative, this article argues that PBA is a less biased sequence (as opposed to snapshot) of students’ learning. “PBA allow students to demonstrate knowledge and skill through critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and the application of knowledge to real-world situations. In other words, it helps students prepare for college, career, and life.”
Not all assessment data is equal: Why validity and reliability matter | NWEA
This teacher’s guide from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) focuses on the importance of reliability and validity of standardized testing. While I am no fan of their assessments, MAPS testing and i-Ready Inform Assessments, I do appreciate their definitions for validity and reliability and how they explain what these look like in practice.
Schoolishness with Dr. Susan Blum | Human Restoration Project
Here is Dr. Blum speaking on The Human Restoration Project with Chris McNutt. Blum draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
This conversation between Trevor Aleo and Susan D. Blum Muses is wonderful! In this episode of Aleo’s Conceptually Speaking, Blum offers both critique of schoolishness and her hopeful possibility of more authentic, joyful learning. I highly recommend this affirming podcast episode. It’s validating the very real struggle teachers endure, especially with annual standardized testing.
I don’t usually recommend my own work, however, I do really like the resources I linked in this previous post. It was true then, and is still true today, what matters most is that my students are happy, healthy, and growing in more ways than can be measured on any standardized test.
In this clip from Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and former educator, discusses the negative impacts of screen technology on the cognitive development of our students. However, there is one important point that I do not think is getting enough attention. At the 3:11 mark, he tells a story about the biggest standardized test of them all, the SATs.
Think back to your childhood, to your schooling. I guarantee all of us at one point took a test on reading comprehension. And the way it looked is this. Here’s a passage of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12 questions about that passage. Most of them are inferential, not factual. They’re asking you to go beyond what you just read to see what you understood. Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading comprehension section. Here’s what it looked like. Here is a single sentence of 75 words. Here is one question fact-based about that that sentence. Next. Here is another sentence of 75 words. Here is one question about that sentence. Next. Last year, they redefined reading comprehension to mean short sentences with one question about each. That is skimming. That’s not reading. Why would we ever do that? Because what do kids do on computers? They skim. So rather than determining what do we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That’s not progress. That is surrender.
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