Why are affluent parents so "testy"?
It's not hard to figure out why teachers' unions oppose testing. It's definitely not hard to figure why students don't like it. But why on earth would affluent parents oppose it? Debra Saunders explores this mystery in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle:
You'd think [affluent] parents would be embarrassed to voice this [anti-testing] opinion in public, because it's so anti-education -- except they are so uninformed as to not even understand what they're against.
1. Tests like the STAR [Standardized Testing and Reporting program] test diagnose problems in individual students' learning. Middle-class parents may think their kids are getting a great education, but STAR can red-flag a learning disability or signal that Buffy failed to learn a math skill. Discover the problem early, and Buffy doesn't fall further behind.
2. Standardized tests highlight what is working. When the Open Court reading program raised reading scores in Sacramento, and showed weaker performance in the five schools that used a different reading series, it showed Sacramento what worked. Superintendents of other districts also could see tangible results.
3. Low test results shame schools to improve. Low-performing schools have been able to benefit greatly. Oakland Unified, for example, adopted Open Court to boost its dismal reading scores, and student literacy improved.
4. The California exit exam has forced students and schools alike to make sure that those who weren't learning much in high school at least graduate with a minimal level of reading and math skills...
5. All students who go to a California state college or university benefit from the exit exam and standardized tests...
Debra isn't suggesting that students do nothing but take tests - testing shouldn't last for days on end, nor should it be redundant. Certainly, a testing program should undergo constant quality assurance checks and reform, to be sure that the test is valid and that the results are not being affected by test fatigue.
This sort of commentary isn't a wholesale criticism of parents who do everything they can (and who buy everything they can) to help improve their child's education. I've no patience with people who oppose capitalism, or who think that income should be redistributed so that no child has more opportunity to learn than any other child. Many is the time that a testing critic has said to me, "You know, SAT scores are related to the parent's income," as though I've never heard this argument before and will be forced to beat a hasty retreat in the face of its mighty logic.
What these testing critics don't do is carefully consider that statement in context. If they did, they'd realize that virtually every indicator of intellectual achievement for youths in our society is somewhat related to parental income. Given that we live in a capitalistic society, and given that kids in our society are financially dependent on their parents during their K-12 education (and usually beyond), it's going to follow naturally that kids from wealthier families are going to have more opportunities to learn than kids who are not so well off. It would be bizarre if the SATs were not related in some way to income. That's reality.
So I don't begrudge parents the chance to improve their own kid's education. I do, however, take offense when they oppose testing that is desperately necessary to help improve education for kids who aren't so lucky. I know that outcomes can never be equalized, but certainly opportunities can be more equal, and standardized testing is the way to tell if underfunded schools that serve the poorer kids are doing the job right.
It's appalling that many parents' groups don't see it this way, and this sort of snobbish opposition has been going on for some time. For example, there's CARE (the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education) in Massachusetts, which is fighting the MCAS (under the aegis of FairTest, of course). Unfortunately, Blogger deleted my post related to the New York Times' article, The Test Mess, and the article is no longer free on the NYTimes website. In this article, a member of CARE had the gall, bad taste, and lack of historical perspective to claim that testing was equivalent to the yellow stars that Jews had to wear in Germany in WWII.
Other CARE supporters don't lack for snobbery. Dan Greenberg, in this article from 1999. insists that math questions such as the following are meaningless: "A repair service charges $25 to send a service person on a call and $30 per hour for labor. If h stands for the number of hours of labor, which [algebraic] expression below can the company use to compute the charge for the service call?"
Meaningless, because "everyone knows how to compute the charge, even little kids," and knowledge of algebraic expressions is useless. He also doesn't understand why all 10th-graders should be subjected to "abstract literary pieces" by Thomas Wolfe, Shakespeare, and William Faulkner, because "very few sixteen-year-olds, or adults for that matter, [will] find [these] absorbing." So Faulkner should be reserved only for the special kids in AP classes, eh, Mr. Greenberg?
Then there are the smart kids who boycott tests, ostensibly because the tests are "unfair." Boycotting tests is the ultimate method of sparing oneself any exertion while still making a "brave" political statement. These boycotters are similar to the collegiate anti-war protestors who are forever skipping class to show their "courageous" dissent. "Hey, it's a big sacrifice to skip Professor Humdrum's Statistics 101 class so that we can go wave signs around and holler at passersby, but we're willing to make that sacrifice!" Yeah, right.
Anyway, the classic example of student test boycotters is Kimberly Marciniak, the Texas student who boycotted the state exams - with parental approval, of course. She insists that the tests are biased against minorities and poor students. She's one of the best students in her class, so I couldn't figure out why no one had bothered to explain to her that the tests, in fact, are the best means of identifying failing schools so that educational reforms can be implemented to help these poor students do better. Apparently, either her parents didn't understand this, or they simply wanted their overachieving offspring to be spared the misery of having to take these basic skills exams, so it's not surprising that Kimberly's comments went unchallenged by those around her.
Joanne Jacobs has more on this as well.