John Doughney Blogs from Plato’s Cave
Doughney’s latest post at his blogspot page is yet another bland rant against cave dwellers who aren’t as enlightened as him, the punitive shackles of standardized testing, and the failure of voters to select his favorite school board candidates. It does no good to have a conversation thread there since he randomly deletes all the content and reposts willy-nilly. I presume that’s his reactive nuclear response to trolls or some inability to learn how to moderate the comment thread.
So I’m posting my thoughts on his article here, where even the trolls can climb in the ring and go a round or two with me just for fun.
John, who forged those “shackles of punitive, test based accountability”? Weren’t university administrators and academics the original proponents of standardized testing in the United States, since they first proposed adopting and agreeing upon specific tests for granting college entrance? It was educators who developed those tests. Is it fair to blame parents and voters who are influenced by those test scores when electing school board members if that is the only yardstick provided to the public? Standardized testing, which the educators themselves have developed in partnership with the government is pretty much the only measurement we have at the moment, right?
While much standardized testing is mandated by the government, the lion’s share of the development of those tests is performed by academics, many of whom are enjoying lucrative second careers working in the private educational research and services industry as vendors to the state and local school systems.
Some of the loudest objections to standardized testing comes from educators whose schools are producing students who score lowest.
Naturally, lazy or inept educators, and poorly run schools would oppose any system that exposes their failures. On the other hand, an excellent, hard working teacher who was overwhelmed with a massive number of learning challenged students would legitimately object to being judged on the merits of standardized tests.
Critics of standardized testing who are, or have been, working in schools that exhibit downward score trends are therefore the people who should be assumed to have the least credibility on the subject; UNLESS they are offering something along with their criticism: a reasonable alternative.
No measurement means no accountability. Simply railing against the limitations and counterproductive elements in the system without an argument for a well defined alternative, or at least alternatives for the counterproductive elements, exposes nothing outside what any Captain Obvious can see.
Simply doing away with standardized testing, however imperfect it is, leaves society with a precarious outlook. Without incentive to compete for better scores, the quality of education for each student depends mostly on whether they end up in a classroom with a lazy or inept teacher or a committed and skilled teacher. Without the objective of standardized testing outcomes, schools would have no incentive to weed out bad teachers or retain good teachers.
I think we agree that standardized testing is imperfect, and too much of it becomes counterproductive.
What are the alternatives to the standardized testing systems that have been designed and developed by academics, yet have academics as their greatest critics?
There’s a hybrid approach in Finland that appears to work well…for Finland. Who knows if it would work in the USA. Another alternative would be tracking university, societal, and occupational success averages of each school’s graduates. That would be as objective as one could get, but would also create a system with a very slow and consistently outdated result. Gathering data on the success averages of former students would, however, be an excellent way to measure the current measurement tool. If standardized testing is counterproductive, we would expect to see a decline in the post graduation success of students that correlates to implementations and increases in standardized testing. If that data shows an increase in post graduation success, that may indicate that standardized testing is contributing to improvement, or at least doing no harm.
Is there any data being collected for that objective?
Outside of public education, standardized testing is almost never used to determine the excellence of an organization. In the corporate world, success and failure is apparent through revenue and profit. In civic organizations, it is apparent through membership growth or decline.
Standardized testing in the form of certification is often used in the corporate realm to determine whether an individual employee has achieved knowledge or skill sets to perform a job, but those are industry standards and corporations are not judged based on how many of their employees score high on such tests. When managers need a specific operating system certified engineer and do not have a team member who can pass the certification test, they hire someone who already has the certification or who has an ironclad ability to pass it. If the existing employee without the certification can’t be sufficiently productive in some other way they are fired or transferred to some other department.
In our socialist public school system, teachers cannot fire their students. They can’t hire students who perform better. They must work with the students that arrive in their classrooms, and very little negotiation for who gets the brighter students is allowed.
The state and federal governments have massive influence on so-called “Independent School Districts”. They can divert funds and grants and hold the purse strings hostage. Through government oversight boards and commissions, some appointed, some elected, such as the Texas State Board of Education, school districts are given rules that constrain and stifle innovation but also prevent rogue teaching, waste, and corruption.
Many of the members of those entities, especially the appointed ones, have extensive career backgrounds in education.
Standardized testing is a tool that has been used to determine ability and progress for individuals since an early Chinese dynasty millenia ago. Teachers have inflicted it upon students in civilized nations for two centuries. But schools and many teachers are aggressively opposed to being subjected to it as a measurement of their own institution’s competence when their scores trend down, yet those same organizations become highly vocal proponents of it when their scores are on the rise.
What are your thoughts on a better measurement methodology or tool set to assess performance of schools and educators? Is this an academic problem or an engineering problem?
