High-Stakes Testing Has Gotten Out of Hand

In New Mexico, the state in which I now live, during the end of the school year this past spring, student walkouts were a common thing, because many students did not want to take the state's standardized test. In New Jersey, fifteen percent of high school students chose not to take state tests in the 2014-15 school year; also, in New York state only a few districts reported meeting the ninety-five percent participation rate, the minimum required by federal rules, according to the New York Times. [1]

"Students in American public schools today take more standardized tests than their peers in any other  industrialized country. American student performance compared to other nations -- on tests that measure skills and knowledge more broadly defined -- remained flat or declined between 2000 and 2012." Once more, the gap between students from poor and affluent families has widened into a chasm, growing by 40 percent between 1985 and 2001. "Some 40 percent of black and Latino students now are in schools in which 90 to 100 percent of the student body are kids of color." [2] Surveys have consistently shown that the family situation is a better predictor of how well a child will do in school than is any other factor.

The per student funding gap between rich and poor schools doesn't help matters, as it grew forty-four percent in the last decade -- even as the number of needy students has grown. [3]

Cheating by teachers and administrators has become a big problem. Cheating emerged as an explosive national problem with the revelations that both teachers and administrators in the Atlanta .public schools were accused of changing answers on standardized tests and earlier this year, a number of them were given prison time. For the 2011-12 school year, the Government Accountability Office reported that officials in thirty-three states confirmed at least one instance of school staff flat-out cheating. .

Math teacher Joshua Katz told reporter Kristina Rizga that every nine weeks he has to stop whatever his students are doing and make time for the district's benchmark tests measuring student progress toward the big Common Core exam in the spring. A teacher interviewed by Rizga said that collaboration with fellow professionals and mutual accountability is more effective than even test scores and financial bonuses in helping students to grow. Yet today, thirty-five states require teacher evaluations to include test scores as a factor -- and many others have introduced new tests just for that purpose. "By 2009, President Barack Obama used his Race to the Top initiative to .promote using test scores to hire, fire and compensate teachers.

No country has ever turned around its educational achievement by increasing standardized testing, according to research conducted by the Center for Global Development.

Footnotes
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[1] Kristina Rizga, "Sorry, I'm  Not Taking This Test," Mother Jones, September/October 2015.

[2] Ibid.; [3] Ibid.