Priorities can get lost in flurry of testing

By René Hill (contact)

Thursday, April 30, 2009 | 2:57 p.m.

Rene Hill

The school year is winding down and scores from state-mandated tests are beginning to trickle in. Some schools have seen improvements of around 10 percent while others have seen drops or no improvement. Public disappointment with student achievement has led to extensive criticism of the school system. The media has reported that our district's dropout rate has risen and today's headlines heralded the failure of federally mandated tutoring programs. There are so many issues that are swirling in the education pot that it is sometimes hard to take a clear view of what is really happening.

Education author Roger Farr wrote an article some years ago that looked at the puzzle of reading assessments. This is appropriate, since one of the biggest drops in scores at this point is reading. The question is why? The data that determines whether scores are really deteriorating is rather sketchy. Assessment has become big business, and school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on professionally designed testing programs. In order to bring a sense to what all the assessments mean, it is first helpful, as Farr wrote, to understand the real purpose of assessment. "Tests should be considered as nothing more than attempts to systematically gather information that is used to help adults and students learn about literacy development," he said.

That is, they should be informative measures to design further instruction for students. They have instead taken on a life-or-death measure of what an entire system is deemed to be doing.

For parents, tests are a measure of their child's progress and what the student is or isn't learning. Parents should look at this information not as what the school is doing wrong, but what their student's strengths and needs are. Teachers and administrators use test scores to help design curriculum and address the needs of students in the classroom. They are looking at the larger picture of educational needs. Students should also look at their own test scores and become good self-assessors.

Finally, no single test can serve all the needs of every group looking at educational performance, yet test makers and public agencies have tried to do just that. Testing needs to be taken out of politics and back where it belongs; as a tool for curriculum decisions. Researchers are working to find methods to work with students that will help them most. Teachers and administrators are fully aware of the needs of students and are working hard to educate them with the best materials possible. While testing has its place, we need to focus on what is really going on in educating children for the future, not whether they are good test takers.

Rene Hill is an English teacher in the Clark County School District. She can be reached c/o The News, 2360 Corporate Circle, Third Floor, Henderson, NV 89074 or editor@hbcpub.com.