The Testing Treadmill

Tests can be standardized; students cannot. No matter how well constructed a test is—and the US spends hundreds of millions on test construction every year—it cannot account for many of the most influential factors in a child’s education. Both in-school factors like teachers and out of school influences like physical and mental health lurk between the lines of every test item because they are inseparable from the students trying to answer each question. And yet, tests are hallowed both as potential equalizers, giving fair and accurate pictures of student achievement, and potential boosters of achievement if schools and teachers comply.

In her recent op-ed, Diane Ravitch states quite bluntly and eloquently: “[S]ome politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.”

To think that high stakes testing can be a silver bullet solution to the multi-faceted issues facing the American education system, is to engage in damaging magical thinking that ignores some of our society’s most pressing problems. Ravitch offers several compelling examples of how this kind of thinking affects schools and the public’s perception of them—how high stakes tests have been used to ignore, and in some cases even cover up deep-seated challenges. Certainly testing has its place and should not be abandoned, but we cannot rely on it as both a means and an end because we will just run headlong into more high stakes testing scenarios for a few more decades, only to realize that we’ve been running on a treadmill.