Column: Do scores on standardized tests matter? Part one, a historical perspective
Retired Superintendent Curt Dubost.
– Standardized scores on nationally normed tests were considered very important when I began school in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Russians had successfully launched Sputnik at the height of the Cold War, and the nation feared our public schools were seriously deficient. Test results were used in many districts to identify “tracks” which grouped students by their scores. In my junior high in Chula Vista, there were three or more such tracks which served separately kids considered to be advanced, average, and remedial. Students were placed in core academic classes together throughout the school day, while we were all together only in Electives and PE. In electives, boys took various shop classes while girls took Home Ec. Scores also informed parents if their child was performing at, above, or below grade level based on national norms.
While well-intentioned, this structure was largely a waste of time and effort for all but arguably the “gifted” track. It definitely made it hard for kids who struggled with tests, had English as a second language, or had grown up in a different culture and/or a home with low parental expectations to be placed in the advanced tracks. Undeniably, these classes most often had the best teachers with the highest expectations. Kids in the gifted track as well as those in the remedial track also were often hazed more than a bit at recess, as I recall.
As a result, by the time I went to graduate school in the 1970s, the whole idea of Tracking was considered misguided and culturally and linguistically biased. It was replaced in most schools, if at all, with ability grouping in clusters within academic classes. Popular theories such as “multiple intelligences” were embraced. Many felt good but lacked academic rigor and were backed by questionable objective evidence of their efficacy. As for the gifted, it was assumed by many they’d be ok since they were the smart kids and they could be role models for higher expectations in heterogeneously built classes. The remedial tracks rarely worked.
Tracking largely ended, but standardized testing was just getting started.
At the same time, there was a huge influx of immigrant students, and the priority became to close the “Achievement Gap” between different demographics. Unquestionably, overall expectations were lowered. For many years, there were no bilingual classes and the kids who spoke no English often just sat there. Immigrant kids who were from families with high expectations and/or who had been in school in their native country and could read at grade level in their native language often did well. As an example, many of the top scholars at Paso High over the years have been immigrant kids who had gone to grade school in San Miguel.
Many, if not most, teachers of necessity taught to the “lowest common denominator” of student ability. As I interviewed for administrative positions in that era, almost all questions asked how I would propose to close the “gap” between the scores of most often Asian or white kids whose parents went to college and the rest of the student body. Often the needs of students who were excelling were ignored while incentives focused mainly on improving the performance of kids with mediocre to low scores.
Financial incentives for schools whose scores went up significantly were often included, and research sadly revealed that about half of the schools which did get remarkable growth in their scores had cheated. One case in Atlanta was particularly disheartening when an examination of erasures on the Scantron forms showed that a preponderance of changed answers had gone from incorrect to correct and clearly had happened after the students had turned in their answer sheets to their teachers/principal.
Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, this zeal for improved test scores at the national level resulted in the bipartisan (yes, there was bipartisanship back then) “No Child Left Behind” Act championed by President Bush and Senator Kennedy. This program required all schools receiving federal funding to participate in high-stakes standardized testing with the goal of all students performing above average. (You may recall the fictional Lake Wobegon from Garrison Keillor at that time.)
Obviously, all kids being above average in anything is a statistical impossibility, no matter how much intervention is prescribed and how many electives or voc ed classes are replaced with intervention classes. In California, each school had an Academic Performance Index score, the statewide release of which each year was a big deal. A neighborhood school’s API figured prominently in the media, in real estate values, in requests to transfer in or out, and in school administrator career advancement.
A confounding variable with school-wide testing has always been that, other than school pride, there really is no incentive for students to do their best on the test. You may remember long ago the California Assessment Program (CAP), which awarded cash to schools whose senior class did well cumulatively on the annual state test.
Some districts did drastically improve their scores. Locally, the Templeton District’s API/Scores went from the bottom of the county to at or near the top. At least part of that growth was attributable to “White Flight” from Paso and other districts but Templeton did show legitimate and substantial increases in scores, and as a result, the enrollment increased dramatically with many requests for incoming inter-district transfers. More kids meant the need to recruit more teachers and with hundreds of applicants from whom to choose, it meant more and more talented teachers could be added to an already excellent staff. Teachers could teach at or above grade level with less time needed for reteaching. The increased enrollment also made possible the addition of many popular fine arts and other electives, AP and vocational classes, innovative programs like Mock Trial, and more team sports in Templeton.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened at many schools with lower API’s. Read the Vergara decision.
In any case, the acute emphasis on test scores ran its course, then largely fell out of favor and was substantially reformed. Teaching to the test and an overemphasis solely on improving test scores was discouraged, and a more holistic evaluation of each student’s and each school’s individual strengths and weaknesses was definitely encouraged. The API school ranking competition in California ended.
(I definitely found way less emphasis on improving test scores in all my staff, parent, and board member input at the end of my career than I did twenty years ago. There was unquestionably more public interest on culture war issues, some legitimate, like athletic participation on girls’ teams, but more often silly, like searching the campus for furry litter boxes. To be sure, we discussed and debated academic issues, but the public was more motivated by partisan politics.)
If done competently, I think that those reforms were much needed and should continue to be encouraged, but IN ADDITION TO, NOT INSTEAD OF, CONTINUED QUALITY STANDARDIZED TESTING.
Professional master teachers welcome and effectively balance teaching kids and teaching the curriculum. I remember my first day of grad school at Stanford where we were all asked what we wanted to teach. I replied high school English. None of us said KIDS, and the professor suggested we should focus more on kids than on the curriculum. Secular humanism was the predominant philosophy, and as usual some educators went way too far away from academic rigor.
The best teachers can be counted upon to challenge every kid to do their best academically while still teaching to the “Whole Child”.They produce kids who both master the curriculum and love school. They are superstars and should be paid as such.
On the other hand, I absolutely believe an unfortunate number of teachers were relieved NOT to be held as objectively accountable for student and school progress and to feel freer to do in their classroom whatever they thought best, even if that included methods with way less objective evidence of student mastery of the prescribed curriculum and often requiring less teacher-directed instruction and fewer papers to grade.
As in most very controversy, I seek a middle ground that doesn’t,” Throw the baby out with the Bath Water.” Academic accountability requires some standardized student testing. Let’s do it right and for sound pedagogical reasons, not political correctness from either extreme.
As an aside, one of the benefits of nationwide testing is to see what’s working elsewhere, and in Mississippi their reading scores are way up statewide using an explicit phonics program and unabashedly teaching to the test with results shared statewide …it works.
In the next column, I will share the predictable result of two misguided “reforms”: UC discontinuing the use of SAT/ ACT results as a criterion for admission and, most recently, many top universities changing all freshman classes to be PASS/FAIL with no grades.
This, while high school grade point averages rise and test scores decline…
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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