KRAL, OAA, PSAT, PLAN, OGT, Explore, NWEA, Test of Cognitive Skills …, IOWA, OTELA, and AASCD are standardized tests given to kindergarten through high school students in Wooster City Schools. During 86 school days or half of the school year, one or more of these tests is being administered at one or more schools in the district. Teachers administer these exams.
Some take an hour,and others, an entire school day. Some exams are administered repeatedly several times throughout the year; others are individually administered to each student in a class multiple times per year. On many of the remaining 89 days during the school year, teachers are preparing children for these tests with mini multiple-choice test worksheets.
Wooster, which is not unlike other school districts, is increasingly devoting financial, technological, and human resources to standardized testing. Wooster introduced a new standardized test this year and plans to offer another next year.
Does the focus on standardized testing replace or enhance substantive teaching and learning? Does this focus encourage teachers to become extraordinary, creative teachers or excellent test administrators? Is classroom teaching a tidy, uniform process of overseeing students taking tests, or is it a process that requires, among other skills, spontaneity and creativity to adapt to the non-uniform, unstandardized learning needs of a class of students?
Recently, Ken Bernstein, a newly retired high school teacher from Virginia, wrote a public apology to college professors for the educational limitations of a decade of students who have grown up taking standardized tests at the expense of developing higher-order intellectual skills necessary for college.
What do these tests cost, and whom do they benefit? A 2011 study concluded states nationwide are spending $1.7 billion annually on these tests. Taxpayers pay for them, and a burgeoning testing industry profits from them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Isn't it time to reverse this trend, and to focus on meaningful teaching and learning? $1.7 billion could go a long way to pay about 32,000 teachers. We could add teachers, reduce class sizes, teachers could teach, and students could learn.