The Core Knowledge Blog

Back during the Vietnam War, “What if they gave a war and no one came” was a popular anti-war slogan. I was thinking about that in the run-up to the New York State ELA tests here in New York City. The pressure over standardized tests is enormous everywhere, but it seems especially acute here in the Big Apple, where the mayor and chancellor have made it a cornerstone of their reforms. A piece by yours truly in this morning’s New York Sun wonders out loud what might happen if parents in New York, who are clearly fed up with testing, decided to keep their kids home from school the day of the test.

As a teacher, I never had a problem with standardized tests. I still don’t. If you don’t want to be held accountable, you’re probably in the wrong line of work. The problem, obviously, is not the test but test prep. One of my graduate students last year, a first year Teach for America corps member, told me that her school mandated two-hours of test prep a day starting the first week of school. Clearly this level of anxiety is counterproductive. It’s not reasonable to place enormous consequences on a test and then expect a school to conduct itself as if this Sword of Damocles isn’t hanging over its head. If we want children to have a well-rounded, content-rich education it’s simply not going to happen (especially in high-poverty, low-performing schools such as the one where I worked) with the existing prep-and-test strategy.

What to do? In a previous piece in the NY Sun, I argued for random testing. If schools didn’t know when they would be tested, the grade or even the subject matter — reading, science, math, etc. — the only way to produce a good result would be (mirabile dictu!) to educate children. One of the interesting issues going forward in ed reform, I think, is how to preserve accountability, which is necessary and good, without turning the accountability measure into one’s sole and exclusive reason for getting out of bed each morning.

Got a better idea? Love to hear it.