NJ Education Report

Ann Hyslop of Bellwether is just the smartest person in the room on the dangers of the growing resistance towards  standardized testing. One in eight teachers, she writes, “don’t believe in standardized testing” and “[m]uch like the debate over global warming, these non-believers refuse to validate an unassailable fact: Standardized testing does have positive—and predictive—value in education and in life, just as the Earth is, indeed, getting warmer.”

And, like global-warming deniers, the anti-testing movement – and this includes not only teachers but suburban parents in wealthier communities and legislators of all stripes (Tea Partiers, union-panderers, conservatives,  progressives) — seems to have developed amnesia over the most important development enabled by NCLB’s accountability procedures: stark and irrefutable evidence of the achievement gaps between socio-economic groups and the attendant accountability measures that mandate that schools address these disparities.

Hyslop continues,

Now, it’s one thing to dislike standardized testing or point out its flaws. It’s an entirely different matter to refuse to believe in it, to claim that it provides no information of any value. And with teachers, parents, advocates and policymakers on both sides of the aisle losing faith in statewide annual standardized testing—refusing to see these measurements of teaching and student learning as anything but unreliable, worthless or biased—education reform is coming to a crossroads. One path is dominated by these non-believers. On it, “subjective perception and experience become the sole arbiter of truth,” as my colleague Sara Mead wrote, and “we are left with the…forces of emotion, sentiment and affinity to guide our judgments and decisions.”

Meanwhile in the U.S. Congress, GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander is about to introduce legislation that would eliminate annual standardized testing in grades 3-8. This would be a boon for high-performing districts and opt-out advocates, but a retreat from a braver front that recognized the value of measuring student growth, regardless of where families can afford to live.  In other words, this denial is a boon for those who reside in the security of high-achieving school districts and a blow for families – like those in Camden or Trenton or Newark – who wake up every morning knowing that their child has only a one in two chance of ever receiving a high school diploma. Standardized testing doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but it provides those who value equity with a yardstick for measuring progress,  Otherwise, we’re just wearing rose-colored glasses.