Thousands of high school seniors are skipping out on new state-mandated science and social studies tests in Boulder, Colorado.
It is the latest skirmish in an escalating battle over Colorado’s increased emphasis on standardized tests.
No doubt it will not be long before some wag suggests a connection between Colorado’s recently liberalized pot legislation and what looks to be, at first glance, the hazy fumes of student revolution.
But reports from Colorado media indicate that this refusal is not a smoke-filled uprising against testing, per se. It is more about high school seniors who are tired of being tested again and again without any apparent gain, relevance or advantage to their educational experience.
“We have grown up taking standardized testing ever since third grade,” said one high school senior. “This protest comes as a result of frustration about taking tests we don’t feel are relevant.”
Kids speaking up about politically misdirected practices in education. That can’t be all bad.
Even Boulder Valley superintendent Bruce Messinger, who has met with students, is sympathetic. “This isn’t an anti-testing movement,” he said. “It’s more to say, ‘Do we need to look at the level of testing and timing of the testing?’ ”
The kids in question, their parents and their teachers are part of a growing resistance in the U.S. to a seemingly endless battery of state and nationwide standardized tests.
Fuelled originally by the Bush era “No Child Left Behind” and rekindled by the Obama “Race to the Top” funding initiatives, all but a few states have agreed to adopt what are called “Common Core” standards and, according to federal officials, those goals need to be tested and met — if states want access to federal money.
Welcome to the world of high-stakes standardized testing. This is live-or-die stuff for U.S. state departments of education and school districts desperately needing the federal funding that, in turn, is based on those test results.
In the U.S., the testing industry has become a big-money business all by itself, with two multi-state consortia — the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — both vying for their share of a cornucopia of federal grants to develop “Common Core” tests.
Pearson Education, a commercial education provider with worldwide reach, had won the contract to provide a number of states that are part of PARCC with test-items, test delivery, reporting of results, and analysis of student performance.
The American Institutes for Research, a Washington-based organization, also has a substantial place in the testing field. It has filed a legal action in New Mexico state court that argues that the big-money contract awarded to Pearson was illegal and structured in a way that wrongly benefited only one company — Pearson.
Lawyers are involved.
You could take a wild guess at how most B.C. educators view all this argy-bargy. Perhaps the lesson to be learned for spectators like us, relatively safe as we are from the jingoistic chaos that is the U.S. political system, is that the profit motive, political philosophy and the political spin that accompany all this testing are, in general, a bad mix with public education.
Here in Canada, large-scale testing such as B.C.’s Foundation Skills Assessment is mildly controversial, but compared to U.S. practices, not a toxic driver for school or school district funding.
Many districts feel the costs of the FSA could be better spent in support of classrooms in need, but that’s another story.
B.C. students also participate in the Program for International Student Assessment. PISA 2012 focused on mathematical literacy. While the results are open to political misrepresentation and the odd bit of front-page grandstanding, usually by persons not directly involved, the results generally reassure everybody that public education is Canada is in reasonably good shape.
Storm clouds emanating from the southern horizon appear when policymakers here begin to draw erroneous conclusions and then correlate those conclusions with increasingly controversial and politicized factors such as class size and composition — all of this based on standardized tests results alone.
Watching the dystopian circus that U.S. standardized testing has become should provide a timely caution for Canadian policymakers and “think tanks” that test results are only one small piece of the very complex process of public education.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
