Beyond high-stakes testing, the real work of education reform is still waiting
By Jonathan Supovitz
Pressure is building on Congress to overhaul No Child Left Behind, the law that has made high-stakes testing the centerpiece of U.S. education policy for nearly a decade.
President Obama is urging lawmakers to revise or replace NCLB. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll shows that a solid majority of Americans want the law mended or even scrapped. And everyone recognizes that U.S. schools won’t come close to NCLB’s target of full grade-level proficiency in reading and math in 2014.
Some people will tell you that all we need to do is fine-tune the tests, ratchet up accountability, and make the targets more realistic. They’re wrong! Tinkering with the tests will not produce substantive improvement in the education system
The problem is that a test is not a reform—it is a tool for measuring educational progress. We’ve confused genuine reform with the instruments we use to measure whether reform is successful.
Some politicians and education industry insiders like high-stakes tests because they’re essential to a robust system of accountability—high-stakes tests show that we’re determined to hold schools accountable for student performance. But testing and accountability alone can’t fix what’s wrong with American education.
We certainly motivate educators when we hold them accountable for the results of the high-stakes tests their students take. But what do we motivate them to do? Years of research on NCLB and similar high-stakes testing programs tells us that without anything more to go by than the results of high-stakes tests, educators will produce shallower, not deeper instruction. That is, they’ll “teach to the test.” They’ll use valuable class time to go over test-taking strategies. And they’ll put far more emphasis on the tested subjects—reading and math—at the expense of subjects like science that our children need to learn if they’re going to compete in the global economy.
Nor can high-stakes tests tell us much about why children aren’t doing well in school. Why does this student struggle with decimals, and why does that one have trouble understanding what she has read? High-stakes tests are silent when we want answers to these and other questions that give teachers insights to guide their instruction. A good test can point out children’s strengths and weaknesses, but much of the guidance for how to act on that knowledge must be found elsewhere.
There’s nothing wrong with using high-stakes tests to measure progress, or using the test results to hold educators accountable and prod them to make our children’s education better. And there’s nothing wrong with fine-tuning standardized tests to help make sure that the curriculum teachers teach is aligned with a set of standards that spell out what children need to know.
But high-stakes testing does not give educators the information they need to improve their teaching, nor does it build their capacity to better serve their students. More critically, an undue obsession with testing deflects our attention from the deeper problems of education, including vast disparities between poor and wealthy school districts, a stubborn achievement gap, a frightening high school dropout rate, and a flood of high school graduates who are poorly prepared for college and the work force.
To fix these intransigent problems, we need more substantive reforms. We need ways for teachers and administrators to get more and better information about their students, at the classroom level and in real time. We need to do the harder work of building a robust repertoire of responses, through improved teaching methods curricula, and other instructional tools
It won’t be easy. Indeed, our collective lack of the will and capacity to enact meaningful reform is the very reason that the relatively cheap and easy approach of test-based accountability has come to be seen as the solution. Testing and accountability let us think we’re getting tough on American education, but the hard work of improving instruction remains largely untouched.
Jonathan Supovitz is an associate professor and director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.