A "Down-Easterner" insists that standardized testing won't help school reform. This article in the Lewiston, Maine Sun Journal calls the No Child Left Behind Act "appalling" and "burdensome". I agree with the burdensome part, as I think that requiring schools, many of whom were following their own paths, to conform more closely to a national standard is a burden of sorts. I just happen to think it's a necessary one.
The author's complaints:
There’s nothing wrong with high standards, but this law strips states of authority and hamstrings schools with demands that are not likely to be fully funded, ever.
So is that a recipe for disaster, or will schools cut out all the dead-wood administrators and teachers and become more efficient at education? Low-income schools can perform well - and such schools often rely on testing.
States - and local taxpayers -- already are burdened by the chronic under funding of the special education act of 1975.
Well, my regular readers can guess what my response to that is. Why continue to fund such an act, when a better alternative is to change how we teach kids to read so we can stop putting so many of them in special education classes?
And we wonder: Is more standardized testing the answer?...We doubt that forcing educators to appease demands for better test scores will fix the country’s outdated schooling system.
No, and testing in and of itself was never meant to. Testing is an objective and relatively inexpensive way to see if reforms work. Any school administrator who believes that merely giving more tests will fix whatever's broke should be transferred to a paper-pushing job in Antarctica. But invalid test scores aren't going to help us see where the problems are, and won't help us see when we've fixed things. So it's important to establish that we have a valid and reliable measurement in place to assess the reforms.
We ought to take a good portion of the $26 billion authorized for the upgrade and study the system itself. Are the physical and intellectual structures of institutions really conducive to learning? What are the alternatives?...Let’s find out.
By all means, let's, as long as we are allowed to consider the failures of past educational pet theories, such as holistic reading and the New Math, to be part of that research. A lot of different things have already been tried, but educators are often loathe to admit that any of them have failed.
And let’s look at the scientific evidence revealing that people learn in many different ways, using many types of intelligences...Most schools offer alternative programs for “at-risk” kids. But they might not reach that verge-of-failure stage if teaching methods were tailored to learning styles.
I agree totally, but what does that have to do with removing tests? How do we know if kids have learned if we don't test them on it? Is the author pushing for more flexibility for teachers to help kids learn the basics, which are very easy to test, or is this a slippery argument for "Some kids learn differently, and we just can't test them"? It's hard to tell.