The High Stakes Testing Disease

John Merrow:

When I was a kid and when my now-grown children were kids, tests were designed and used to assess student performance and make judgements about school quality.  Now, however, tests are all about holding teachers and principals ‘accountable.’  We have lost our way, and the cheating epidemic is the clearest sign of that.  Principals and teachers know that their livelihood depends on rising test scores, and so the curriculum has been narrowed; adult energy is focused on the so-called ‘cusp kids’ who are just a few points shy of making it over the bar; music, theatre, and field trips have disappeared; children are objects to be manipulated, not living, breathing human beings with individual needs, strengths and weaknesses; and morally weak adults are cheating.

Here’s the rub: Cheating is not the problem that must be addressed. It is the most visible and disturbing symptom of the disease, but the disease itself is our excessive reliance on high stakes testing.

This disease will eventually pass, but in the meantime there are going to be quite a few careers and reputations destroyed by it before it's all said and done.


As Michael Fiorillo noted in a comment:

the Common Corporate Standards and the tests they are a vehicle for will quite likely collapse of their own unworkability and rising parent opposition. In that sense, think Carol Burris is probably right. However, in the meantime, thousands of teachers will be chewed to pieces, and millions of students will be abused and turned off to school by this malign nonsense. And then it will take years, perhaps decades to undo the damage caused by these social vandals.

We won't mention how some education reform cheerleaders, by uncritically waving their pom-poms at so many of the reforms over the last few years, helped bring about the disease of high stakes testing that is ravaging schools all across the nation.

Still, it's nice to have them awakening to the mess, even if they're still having some difficulty with the "Come To Jesus" moment and admitting to their own complicity in this mess.