Bruce Holbert: Standardized testing fads thrive on failure

Spring delivers us the vernal equinox, and the perennial flowers return. Barbecues are relit and lawn mowers clunk in the morning air. In the high school where I teach, couples walk hand in hand up the halls. However, teachers’ brows are raked with wrinkles and their mouths are flat with either worry or exasperation: This is also the season for standardized tests.

Educators do not dismiss such tests. They can provide objective measures of our students’ performance in relationship to larger samples, and the results can help determine a school’s or teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. Of course, for such data to be reliable, it must be gathered over a period of several years to eliminate the anomalies of outliers that may skew results. Recently, data have become the hot button for schools. Pressed by state and federal governments, school districts hunger for hard numbers to demonstrate they meet standards. One would think these standardized tests would be a useful resource and, used in a statistically valid way, they would be.

However, there seems to be little interest, and no profit, in validity.

Washington used the Washington Assessment of Student Learning from 1997 to 2009. It was replaced by the High School Proficiency Test, which will be replaced by the Smarter Balance test (aligned with Common Core) this spring. These tests vary in too many regards to provide common data. In fact, they differ enough that when each was rolled out – three tests in six years – the state and school districts invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare teachers for them. Even for the test with the most lengthy run, the WASL, validity is a significant problem. Often, after examining the scores, the state returned the tests for rescoring, sometimes because the scores were too high, sometimes because they were too low; hardly a sound approach to gathering data. And how are the scorers selected? The testing company administering the new Smarter Balance recently advertised for scorers in Seattle’s Craigslist, promising $11 an hour, the same minimum wage someone working at a Seattle McDonald’s earns. I have nothing against fast food or fast food employees, and some, with proper training, could likely score these tests adequately. However, one must concede that people at this wage level are typically high school students themselves or folks for whom academics is not their primary priority.

As for profits, standardized testing is a business and, like any business, it must create and increase demand to succeed. To do this, the industry has taken a page from the technology business model: planned obsolescence. They present a test as the newest, most advanced tool to measure student progress, and market it to state governments. Meanwhile, the developers are designing the next test, which will be even newer and more advanced. This approach coincides nicely with the ancillary businesses of testing consultants (an enterprise often consisting of former educators) whom school districts employ to prepare their staffs for each new version. The process, too, fits nicely with political cycles. Education is always a political issue, and trashing the old test for a new version is a way for a governor or legislator to put his or her own brand on a solution.

The most significant concern these ventures share is also the most perplexing. These businesses rely upon the failures in education to maintain their existence. The testing industry can only be destroyed by one thing: student success. If students succeed, the tests become unnecessary, the consultants have no purpose, and the politicians have to move on to other issues to cajole voters. Continued failure guarantees perennial demand and profit. As civil defense contractors whose services require war must construct conflict to demonstrate their necessity, the testing industry relies upon failures to sustain a need for its services. So, for these consultants, these test developers, those in charge of implementation and scoring, those lobbying state education departments for testing services, and for those politicians campaigning on education reform, the perception (which they must foster and sustain) of a failing educational system guarantees their livelihood.

I can’t help but imagine what might result if the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on testing each year were instead invested in a venture that pairs its success with student success. I wonder, too, what the public would think of a teacher who established conditions in his or her classroom that guaranteed student failure in order to remain employed.