By Arnold Hillman, special to Statehouse Report | I am against high-stakes educational testing, both on a state level and on a national level. It is so easy to whomp up phony comparisons and destroys kids’ and teachers’ egos. Here in South Carolina, we have even created a Corridor of Shame to mark those school districts as failures. No, we don’t really use that word, but everyone knows what it means.
We have now come up with another euphemism called “School Report Cards.” It gives real estate sales folks a way of zipcoding your choice of where you should and shouldn’t live. Who started all this stuff anyway?
At the beginning of the 20th century, a gent named Louis Terman decided that he wanted to figure out a way to test people’s intelligence. He culled seven “smart” boys and seven “dumb” boys from a local school of 500. He developed some questions and the smart boys did well and the dumb boys didn’t. He discarded the creativity that the “dumb” boys showed on some of the tests he had created.
In the 1960s, a fellow named J.P. Guilford identified many different kinds of intelligences. It took me 10 years to read his book. Artists, athletes, computer geeks, video game creators, architects, inventors, Bill Gates’s and Steve Jobs’s (bless him) will be happy to know that you have a different sort of intelligence than Dr. Terman identified.
The tests that students take, created by the state and forced upon school districts, are not viewed by anyone after a student graduates. Did you have to show your scores on the test to a prospective employer, a college admissions officer or a military recruiter? Even the military has its own test, the ASVAB.
Testing is everywhere. The crown prince/princess of all tests is the SAT/ACT which kind of stamps you at a moment when you apply for admission to a college. Have you ever wondered what kind of predictor these tests are about success in college or in life? There’s not enough space here to tell you, but here is a link to an interesting study.
Do you ever wonder how the federal government got into the testing business? I thought that education was an item reserved to the states. In 1973, a Mr. Rodriguez sued the San Antonio School District because he felt that his children were not getting an education as good as the suburbs. It was the first funding equity case. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court said that since education is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Supremes would not decide the fairness or unfairness of the funding system in Texas. Now the feds threaten states for not going along with the testing by withholding federal money, such as Title I. So there.
Many colleges are now looking more carefully at grade point averages (GPA). Somehow they seem to think that teachers might have a better handle on a student’s performance than a couple of hour test. What an amazing thought. As a legislator once told me. “It’s too complicated to look at anything but test scores to determine how well a school district is doing.”
Having visited 21 of the 41 rural schools in South Carolina, I can tell you with my 57 years in education that many of them are doing spectacular things with the kids. They are up against the tidal wave of poverty, but they are succeeding. Let’s give the teachers more time to teach and can the testing.
Longtime educator Arnold Hillman is a founder of the S.C. Organization of Rural Schools. He lives in Bluffton.
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We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
Excellent analysis Arnold. We have been consumed in this hyper-accountability movement for the past 20 years in S. C. Please point to any evidence to suggest these efforts have been successful!!
Thank you for caring about the “impact” of testing on teachers, students and schools. There are also deeper implications on the communities that help raise, nurture and protect our children. Ultimately, the testing dilemma will
come down to the question; what is it you want
to accomplish? If testing advocates want to “label” schools and the students in them, they are succeeding. However, if we have a sincere
desire to assess what our students know, are able to do and at what levels, there are more efficient and reliable means; also less damaging to our children, schools, communities and staff providing valuable services to them daily.