The tests we need
The always-pertinent Hoover Institution has a new essay on "The Tests We Need", by Herbert Walberg. The Institute tends to be pretty pro-testing, in general, so I'm not surprised to find a lot of arguments in favor of testing here, and I'm also not surprised to find that the arguments are sound. The people at HI know what they're talking about.
Selected quotes:
First, we need to know how our students compare with those in other countries. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk began shifting policy-makers' and the public's concerns to student achievement. The report showed that American students lagged behind those in other countries and argued that the best jobs, including those in the industries of greatest growth, required general knowledge, language mastery, and mathematical, scientific, and technical skills...Even with our high per-student spending (compared to the rest of the industrialized world), the longer U.S. students are in school, the farther behind they fall. If our students are to meet world standards, we need to measure their progress and find out what works best.
Second, systematic testing provides useful information. School boards should hold educators accountable for the results they produce; they should examine educators' progress compared to that of others in attaining well-defined achievement standards...Moreover, frequent examinations help provide teachers with information about what students are learning.
Third, national surveys indicate that educators are much less enthusiastic about tests than citizens, parents, and even students...Tests help teachers concentrate on what parents and the public expect children to accomplish. For children in poverty and related conditions, school provides the best opportunity to rise above their circumstances. Finally, tests are cheap. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby estimates that we annually spend $4.96 per pupil on commercial tests and from $1.79 to $34.02 on state tests—tiny fractions of average per-student spending of $8,157.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Often, we hear educators complain that testing destroys "critical thinking", when in fact tests can measure critical thinking just fine. Educators are often the first ones, and the only ones, to claim that tests over-stress kids and destroy their self-esteem, but tests that measure factual knowledge can boost self-esteem - if the teachers do their best to impart that knowledge. Kids like to know how much they've learned, and they enjoy knowing when they've made progress. Testing can help with that.
Of course not all tests are perfect, and some tests may be so poorly designed that they are invalid, unreliable, and overly-stressful. However, a well-made test that properly measures the state standards will be none of those things. If we're going to hold a reasonable discussion on the pros and cons of testing, then the arguments, made by many testing critics, that tests are by default stressful, invalid, or biased should be ignored, because these positions deny reality and add nothing to the debate.