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In the June 13, 2005 edition of Newsweek, columnist Anna Quindlen writes about many of the same troublesome issues with standardized testing covered on this website since last September. Near the end of her piece she states: “I wish more parents could find a way to protest this educational form of child abuse.” One might wonder about the origin of all of these tests in the first place.

There are so many tests being given nationally that it is difficult to track them. Some tests are required under the federal No Child Left Behind law, and typically the department of education in each state determines what those tests will be. State mandated tests have also been around in some cases before the NCLB law was enacted and the same tests were re-purposed in order to meet the federal mandate. In New Jersey the tests that have been used to meet the NCLB requirements are the NJ ASK, the GEPA and the HSPA tests. The reader will no doubt hear about how successful Readington children have been on these tests before long.

Other standardized tests are not mandated by any authority other than the individual school district. In Readington, for example, such tests have included the Terra Nova, the InView and the I-Know programs sold by CTB-McGraw Hill. Some of these non required tests purport to predict or improve the scores on state-mandated tests.

Still another level of standardized testing exists for individual students to choose to take in order to qualify for entry into other areas of education. These include tests like the SAT, PSAT, ACT and the GRE.

Anna Quindlen took the SAT test before she wrote her article, and noted that “by the end I thought the top of my head would blow off.” She was horrified by the fact that children as young as third grade were suffering through these sorts of tests, yet Readington has given non-required tests as young as first grade. Anna writes:

“…more than anything I was enraged by the process, and by the forced march that seems to have replaced creative thought, critical thinking and joyful learning for so many kids…And what does this metastasizing testing, for every subject, at every level, at every time of the year, do to kids? It has to mean that students absorb the message that learning is a joyless succession of hoops through which they must jump, rather than a way of understanding and mastering the world.”

Holly Harrington, a fifth grade student in Haddonfield, New Jersey would agree. Holly wrote about the NJ ASK in the February 2005 NJEA Review:

“What do you do when you want an assessment that stresses tests and is a pest? You turn to NJ ASK, a test the government makes you take. It makes students tense and nervous. Even teachers dislike the test. It wastes time that should be spent on the curriculum…The test never teaches anything to anyone. It just spends money for all the computers, paper and pencils.”

In California, Connecticut, Utah, Arizona, Texas and other places there is now legal action pending on aspects of the NCLB law that was championed by both the Clinton and Bush administrations. It will take time to resolve these legal issues, but the impact of testing is already well known. Experts and analysts such as W. James Popham, Alfie Kohn, Peter Sacks, Linda McNeil, Susan Ohanian, Chip Wood and many others have developed a large body of work showing that standardized testing ranks rather than rates students, that it says far more about the social and economic background of a child or school than it does about educational quality, that it fosters classroom practices that are counter to authentic learning, that it can provide a pointless source of stress for students and teachers alike, and that it can be highly misleading to those using scores to evaluate teaching, learning or curriculum.

In the face of this body of work it would seem crazy for a school district to choose to give extra helpings of standardized tests on top of what is already required by the state. Yet, that is exactly what Readington has done. In fact, as school board President Mark Berry indicated with his enthusiastic comment at the June 7 board meeting that “Test scores are higher than ever!”, it is evident that our district plan is to focus almost exclusively on such scores as a measure of quality. Despite lip service to other forms of assessment, it is test scores that are most frequently used by Readington school leaders to crow “success.”

The reader will no doubt recognize the well-worn argument heard around our schools these days that we must expose children to such-and-such earlier, because in the next grade or the next school they will be hit even harder with it. For instance, in the earlier grade the practice of “invented” spelling must be ended because in the later grade correct spelling will be expected. Or, in high school there will be PSAT and SAT tests to take, so the children need to be exposed to standardized testing earlier. The HSPA and GEPA tests are therefore a necessary part of growing up. Of course, doing well on the HSPA and GEPA tests is critical preparation for the PSAT and SAT tests and we must also avoid the sanctions and shame associated with not meeting the Annual Yearly Progress dictated by the NCLB law, therefore even earlier testing in the form of Terra Nova and other test-prep tests will be immensely valuable. By this logic, not only do two wrongs make a right, but three, four or five wrongs make a right too. And, now you know the origin of all these tests.