Right now there is a great deal of emphasis on testing in our public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government’s initiative to raise academic standards in public schools, is focused primarily on how well schools do and how much they improve on standardized tests. To the casual outsider this seems like pretty good policy. After all, kids need to know Math and English and Science in roughly the same proportions don’t they? If one school does consistently better on, say, Math, doesn’t that mean that they have received better instruction in Math? And shouldn’t we conversely assume that students not scoring high in Math are receiving poor instruction in Math? Further, this doesn’t live up to the ideal of equal opportunity for all, one of the formative pillars that America was built on. So what’s wrong with testing?
Everything.
Let’s start with the assumption of equal opportunity. Humans are the intersection of hundreds of thousands of variables. We carry this fact into every scenario of our lives. Further, these variables are interdependent not independent, meaning you can’t change one variable without effecting hundreds or thousands down the line, kind of like making a mistake half way through a math problem. Now, how this relates to schools and testing is pretty obvious. If you have 30 children sitting before you, you don’t have 30 clones, you have 30 intersections of thousands of variables. Sarah arrived having just ran multiplication tables with their dad. Joe didn’t sleep because his family spent the night in a homeless shelter. Jill is distracted because her stomach hurts. Even from moment to moment learners are on a continuum of equality. And some have such great advantages that others would take a far greater amount of time (yet another variable) than is available to match their lead. So now what happens when a teacher instructs the class to pull out their math books? Hundreds of things based on hundreds of thousands of things. I can guarantee you that Sarah will be just fine, Joe is going to have trouble and Jill needs to go to the nurse. And what now if you add the over-arching umbrella of problems that is introduced by the one variable of poverty?
But you could argue that even if students are on a continuum of equality they all should average out to about the same level since it’s not every day that Joe spends a night in a homeless shelter and some days Sarah will not be so prepared etc. But I come back to the assertion that this would be true given enough time and resources. Almost anything is possible given enough time and resources but our current educational system has neither. And even if it did you still could never make up for the glaring variable that all people are not created equal. Some understand numbers better than others, some have an easier time reading people’s emotions etc.
SO, to judge schools on a few simple variables (test scores) is reductionist and, to say the least, astonishing. And to further turn those judgments into the reduction of resources, which is how No Child Left Behind deals with under-performing schools, is antithetical to the goal of providing an equal education to all. But then again I’m assuming that that actually is the federal government’s goal. Hmm. If A=B and B=C then A must equal C. Right?
Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans@Next2Friends.com
www.Next2Friends.com
