home | contact | faq

action items

Will Readington teachers be "teaching to the test"?  One criticism leveled at standardized testing programs is that teachers become a slave to the tests due to pressure from the administration to raise percentile scores. In other words, when a teacher knows that scores are the focus that teacher will likely feel the need to prepare his or or her students for test-taking.  The pressure need not be overt.  A September 9, 2004 memo sent home to Readington parents might lead one to believe such a scenario is possible. Judge this excerpt for yourself:

"...With a turn-around time of about four to six weeks, the results [of the TerraNova test] will be used by the child's teacher during this school year to assess the progress of each student in acquiring skills in these critical areas. The data, along with other information about the student, will be used to differentiate instruction in order to better meet needs.  The teachers will also use this information for points of discussion during common planning times in order to meet the curricular needs of students at the grade level."

Presumably the "other information about the student" refers to teacher input, student portfolios, or other assessments.  However, it doesn't sound like those forms are now the primary source of assessment, does it?  Perhaps this is just a case of an unfortunate choice of wording. However, if teachers are to use the TerraNova test to "differentiate instruction" and to plan "curricular needs", and if teachers know their administration is closely examining percentile scores from their classroom, will they not feel pressure to make certain the children in their classroom score well?  How will they do that?

Perhaps the teachers will feel a strong temptation to go over test-taking strategies, or to cover some of the esoteric question subjects they have seen on the test before.  Perhaps our teachers will spend a little more time on test preparation and a little less time on creating dynamic lesson plans.  Perhaps our children will become better at filling in bubbles at the expense of learning to think for themselves.

Some would argue that there is nothing wrong with teaching to the test. As long as the test is good, they argue, what's wrong with teaching what it covers?  It is wrong on many different levels.  First, remember that these tests are written with questions that are designed by their nature to create a bell-curve of results.  Test writers want half the students to score above and half to score below the middle.  As a result, many of the questions will be obscure, difficult, or even inappropriate for the students taking the test. Doing this insures that some students cannot score well and will create the desired bell-curve results. Can it ever be a good idea to align district curriculum with questions such as these? 

Furthermore, since the tests are limited in time, there is only so much information on one subject that can be covered by the questions.  The questions cover merely a sampling of the information that a student in a particular grade would normally cover in the field of science, or social studies or math.  The questions, then, are not only esoteric in nature, but they are limited in scope too.  Can it ever be a good idea to align district curriculum with questions such as these?

Now, after limiting our curriculum to oddball facts with a narrow scope, we will test our students again.  Once again, half will do well, half will not.  The tests are written to ensure this.  What have we accomplished?  We have removed rich, individualized lessons from our curriculum in favor of homogenized, narrowly focused lessons that emphasize what is likely to be on a test.  Even worse, if teaching to the test also means using test scores to evaluate our teachers, as it surely does, we have created  pressure on those professionals to take the shortcuts (read: test prep) necessary to keep their jobs.  Any individualized attention they give to your child will need to be after test prep is complete, after the tests are over, and after the attention of administrators is off their classroom.