A piece in today’s New York Times caught my eye this morning: “Tips for the Admissions Test…to Kindergarten.” An excerpt:
Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.
Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.
These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008….
There is no state registry or licensing for these services, but an Internet search turns up numerous companies with names like Another Young Scholar, Junior Test Prep and Thinking to Learn. Harley Evans, the owner of Manhattan Edge Educational Programs, raised prices this year to $90 a session from $65, but still has his maximum load of 70 children. Daniel C. Levine, the founder of Exclusive Education, based in Manhattan, said that a few years ago, 2 percent of his clientele were children under 6. Now it is about 10 percent….
Some of the thousands of students registered to take the gifted tests in January are also preparing at home. Bright Kids is selling a few hundred $90 workbooks per month, said Bige Doruk, the company’s founder. Dr. Robin MacFarlane of Thinking to Learn said she was on track to sell more than a thousand $60 Olsat prep kits this year, though she advises parents against intensive cramming.
I’m adding this to my “Why Standardized Testing Should Go Away” file.
When I lecture about home education, I tell parents to take standardized testing seriously. In my opinion, standardized testing isn’t going to go away. Ever. (Education is a slippery imprecise messy process, and humans have an almost irresistible drive to reduce slippery imprecise messy processes to neatly quantifiable graphs, charts, and lists.) So we might as well grit our teeth and take the time to prepare our kids and ourselves. The only possible benefit to test preparation, as I’ve often said, is that it teaches kids a basic life principle: there are some hoops that you’re going to have to jump through, and when you get to one it’s a better use of time and energy to jump than to stick your toes in and resist.
Now that I’ve said that, I’m going to share my list of reasons why standardized testing should Go Away.
1. As many, many, many, MANY educators have already pointed out, the existence of standardized tests pushes teachers into using class time for test preparation. Frank Van Schaick, author of Home of the Wilson Wildcats: Life and Death of an American Elementary School, writes about his experiences in a Santa Barbara classroom:
The testing of school children became a great, looming giant. It interfered with real learning. It dictated what teachers did. Everyone had to get high test scores. Class was compared with class, school with school. The whole educational system became diverted to raising test scores rather than gaining understanding or knowledge. We forgot that teaching was not a numbers game….We need to look at the child’s thinking rather than at his test scores; test scores seldom indicate thought. Schools should leave the path of the right answer in favor of the path of ideas an opinions. We need to follow the path of thought.
2. Because standardized test scores are so incredibly neat and tidy, they get used for all sorts of purposes they shouldn’t. From a recent story in The Buffalo News:
The state’s new education commissioner says he wants to de-emphasize assessment testing, saying too much “teaching to the test” is going on in schools.
“In too many cases, the assessment becomes the curriculum,” David M. Steiner said here Wednesday. “If the test is the curriculum, then you’re tempted to teach to the test.”
Steiner, who became education commissioner Oct. 1, told The Buffalo News Editorial Board that assessment testing still has a crucial role in the state’s classrooms but that a more balanced approach is needed.
Robert M. Bennett, a member of the state Board of Regents who accompanied Steiner during his Buffalo visit, was more blunt in his comments, saying assessment testing “has become an obsession” in the state.
Richard P. Mills, Steiner’s predecessor, established the state’s fourth-grade and eighth-grade assessment tests in math and English. Later, the federal No Child Left Behind legislation mandated assessment tests in grades three through eight.
The tests initially were designed to measure the progress of individual students so teachers could identify and work on their academic shortcomings.
But the tests quickly took on far broader significance because they were widely used to compare individual schools and school districts, and to determine which schools would be placed on state watch lists for subpar academic performance.
Some schools even use assessment test results to determine students’ report card grades.
3. Standardized tests give students a nice, simple, completely useless prize to work towards. The hoop becomes the goal (OK, I know a hoop IS a goal, but you know what I mean). From an Illinois paper, the Southtown Star:
On the first day of each school year, Tinley Park High School Principal Theresa Zielinski looks out at the sea of students ahead and informs her junior class of the magic number – how high they need to score on the Prairie State Achievement Exam in order for the school to make Adequate Yearly Progress.
They usually respond with a collective groan.
Then Zielinski tells them that the year before, the students had complained just as loud.
“And you know what,” Zielinski tells them. “They made it.”
At Tinley Park, the students understand the lingo – AYP, NCLB, PSAE – and that made the success of meeting the 70 percent requirement for federally mandated Adequate Yearly Progress in 2009 even sweeter.
“I was really nervous when I heard it was 70 percent,” said 18-year-old senior Elizabeth Noe, who lives in Tinley Park. “But everybody helps you out, and everybody tells you that you can do it. So when we did it, I was so proud.”
Noe is as a Titan Scholar – the title given to students who meet or exceed standards on the PSAE. At the home of the Titans, students who earn this specific academic honor get a special sweatshirt and don’t have to take finals.
They also have their picture hung in two spots in the building and their names framed and flanked by the running tab of the school’s valedictorians and salutatorians since 1964.
“When we put it up, there’s a traffic jam,” Zielinski said. “Everyone wants to see who made it. It’s exciting to see the kids excited about an academic achievement. They deserve to be.”
Well, I’m glad the kids are excited about their achievement…but…
4. As the New York Times piece above makes perfectly clear, the importance placed on standardized tests has turned the testing business into a money-making machine. And yes, I think that’s intrinsically bad.
The test preparation industry is enormous. The Kaplan company takes in more than two billion dollars a year, and that’s only one of a score of high-profile test prep companies that thrive by playing off parents’ fears for their kids. The College Board, ACT, and ETS–the three biggest producers of standardized tests–are nonprofit, but that simply means that the organizations as a whole do not show profit at the end of the year. The College Board earns approximately three million dollars a year from standardized testing, and much of that money goes to extremely high salaries for its executives. (There’s plenty of argument about this all over the media: see here, here, and here for starters.
Schools need to take some responsibility for the state of affairs, by the way. The test prep businesses targeting kindergartners do so because of this dynamic, found later in the piece:
Private schools warn that they will look negatively on children they suspect of being prepped for the tests they use to select students, like the Educational Records Bureau exam, or E.R.B., even though parents and admissions officers say it quietly takes place. (Bright Kids, for example, also offers E.R.B. tutoring.)
“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”
No similar message, however, has come from the public schools. In fact, the city distributes 16 Olsat practice questions to “level the playing field,” said Anna Commitante, the head of gifted and talented programs for the city’s Department of Education.
5. Very strange things can affect standardized tests scores.
On the bus ride to the farm, the children sang rounds of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and a boy yelled, “I love pumpkin pie!”
State tests have references to “things that were pretty foreign to Harlem kids,” one educator said.
But it soon became clear that this was a field “study”— as the teachers called it — not a field “trip,” and the 75 Harlem kindergartners were going not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.
“I want to get smarter,” 5-year-old Brandon Neal said.
“I want to do better on homework and tests,” added Julliana Jimenez, one of his classmates.
New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.
So leaving no possible test point unexplored, the educators at the Harlem Success Academy, a fast-growing chain of four charter schools known for a relentless emphasis on data, have invented a form of test preparation. The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.
I’m sure I’ll be adding to this list as the years go by.
In the meantime, as a realist, I’m still teaching my kids to jump through the hoops.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that standardized testing is a bit of a bear. Trudging through it with six-year-olds who just look at you with that pleading please-stop-this-pain look in their eyes is enough to make you want to quit (oh, wait, I did at the end of that year!).
But I do wonder how colleges and post-college programs can efficiently decipher how well a student will do in their programs if they don’t have something standardized to go on. For example, my husband taught AP calculus to inner-city students in East Los Angeles. He taught them what they were able to handle and some of them got As and Bs. However, on the AP test, I don’t think anyone (except maybe one or two) scored above a 2. In high schools in places like northern VA, however, those same students getting As and Bs in class get 4s and 5s on the AP test. If a college just gets high school transcripts they have to take a lot of time figuring out what an A means from this place versus this place. Another example is this: my father-in-law ran a graduate degree program at a university in Washington, D.C. He said that several colleges have started sending narrative transcripts instead of straight grades for students. He said that he basically had to ignore them because the time it would take to sift through them would be far too much, and what he needs to know, more or less, how students will perform in his program are college transcripts and GRE scores.
I am not trying to disagree and say that I think standardized testing is some gift to humankind. I just wonder if it would be worth the overhaul required of degree programs to re-do how they do admissions.
As for standardized testing in the lower grades, I think a similar logic applies (how are my students doing as compared with students of the same age around the country), but if left unchanged I think it should just end. It’s helpful to know how your students are doing as compared with students who are exactly the same. When I taught in inner-city Los Angeles knowing how my students did compared with schools that had a similar demographic was helpful, but not so helpful when compared with those in Beverly Hills. I don’t know what the changes needed are to get both that helpful information but also not get the please-make-the-pain-end look from those kids.
I do know that high schools have an ID number that tells the colleges right away what kind of high school they are looking at. It identifies things like socio-economic index, how many AP and IB and honors classes are available, the class sizes, charter or other specialty school status. They even have ways of learning how many of the students from high schools were accepted to top or second teir colleges/universities.
This way colleges and universities have a way to compare what students have actually done. My son’s AP Lit class is way too easy. He will make an A that you might think looks great on the transcript, but when colleges see where he earned that A, what type of school it is, they will be able to discern it was a different sort of A than a more rigorous public school or private school. He must nail the AP test itself to show that he has ability.
I do believe that there is an ongoing and genuine effort to compare “apples to apples” in this huge system of college education. At least by the colleges themselves. They have to cut through a lot of hubris though, such as the unending programs and arrangements to even everything out, and the high school ranking systems which use inflated GPA’s in order to name their (10 or 20!) Valedictorians.
AP Tests (not just the classes), SAT IIs, SATs IBs are their attempt to objectify and rectifiy. The same goes for the graduate level of education at better schools, only it is tests like the LSAT instead of the SAT. Oh, and then, when you’re all done, you can take the Bar Exam…….two or three times!
Whew!
Bright (or mainstream college material) homeschoolers, like I said in my post below, can learn to win at this testing game, if they will embrace the challenge, spend a bit of time testing each yearand following up where results indicate we should be. I wish we could see it as a help rather than a hindrance to our children; more a clarifying than strictly narrowing experience.
We basically told our sons that their life is defined by their SAT scores in a real sense. We didn’t really spend any time lamenting it, we just sucked it up and are working with it. That is just one of many things they have to perform well on in high school. There’s college classes, music and speech competitions, leadership, service, jobs, oh…..and a rigorous, multidemensional, multi-perspective academic program…..there’s enough going on that the tests take their place as one of a number of important efforts. With a well rounded, rigorous program, and lots of chances for service and leadership, kids come out of high school with a fairly decent sense of their place, not an SAT -distorted self image.
Sandra – hoping our experiences so far are helpful to those coming behind.
Sandra
I find your part about taking the inner city kids to the farm very interesting. Two of my kids had to take the 4th grade writing test last year through our homeschool charter. The whole test was just one question. “If you were principal for a day, what would you do?” This is obviously just an opportunity for kids to write about mayhem and chaos they would inflict on a school. Yes, I guess they will look for spelling and grammar issues, but – PLEASE. Someone who hates creative writing, but is good at report/factual writing would be sunk here. My big problem is this – one of my kids wasn’t sure what a principal was supposed to do all day. She merely wrote that she would sit in her office and make phone calls all day. I asked my advisor about the test and apparently wasn’t the only parent to think the question was certainly a dumb one to give a room of homeschooled 4th graders. My kids can diagram a sentence and write IEW papers every week. Was this test an adequate measurement of their writing ability? NO WAY.
My youngest took her first STAR test last spring as a 2nd grader. The problem – all of her school work was at least 4th grade. She was bored out of her mind because in 2nd grade the moderator has to read all of the instructions and all of the word problems aloud. I worry a little about her blowing off future standardized tests because they seem like a joke to her.
I understand the need to have a standard or bench mark for colleges, but I consider the days I take my kids to standardized testing as wasted school days.
My “Why Standardized Testing Should Go Away” file is full. Having read a number of books on the testing companies, from the way tests are made to the ways in which they are used and abused, I’m of the belief that what a standardized test tells you is 1) how good you are at taking tests; and 2) what your socioeconomic standing is. It is also very eye-opening to read some of the most recent books on college admissions in light of how they use, value, discard, or weight standardized tests. Non-spoiler hint: they’re not quite as all-important as the testing companies want you to think.
What has also shaped my beliefs about the relatively uselessness of standardized testing is my daughter’s disability. She has Asperger’s Syndrome, and with it an amazing combination of strengths — reading at post-college level at age 11 — and weaknesses — being unable at thirteen to draw a straight line using a ruler or to evaluate character motivation in a socially realistic novel due to autistic spectrum disorder’s interference with social understanding. She has been tested by a neuropsychologist, a multi-day project, eleven hours one-on-one in total; and watching through a one-way window, I have seen how her disability impacts on how she answers and responds to the testing situation and the person testing her. She tests stunningly high in standardized tests using non-fiction as the reading comprehension selections, and this is both ironic and unfortunate in her case, because her intelligence masks the level and nature of her disability and her scores tell an evaluator or teacher nothing that is helpful about how she learns, what she understands, what she can fake or guess her way to, where she most needs help. No single test score tells anyone how to best help her. The overall learning profile that emerged from the huge variety of different kinds of tests the neuropsych administered, on the other hand, was very revealing and helpful; the academic tests alone were pretty worthless.
My daughter may or may not need to take the SATs and GRE some day. What I do know, given her abilities, is that she doesn’t need years on end of practice test-taking, cramming, or prepping to get where she may or may not need to go. She needs a whole lot of help, a whole lot of experience, and a whole lot of practice: but not at test-taking.
I value my daughter’s intelligence very much. It has thrilled me to be her teacher all these years and to see a mind that powerful at work despite her continuing weaknesses. But I have come to believe more and more strongly, even as I am thrilled by her mind, that academics isn’t everything — and that tests do not measure what is most important and necessary to know, about my daughter or about any child. I’m aware how wishy-washy this may sound. But I’m also aware, after teaching at a homeschool co-op for a number of years and lecturing at two local universities for over a decade, that I can tell as much about a kid from a good fifteen minute conversation — maybe I can tell a more — than from any file of test scores and grades. It doesn’t come in the form of a neat number and therefore it seems subjective rather than objective; but I am of the opinion that the neat numbers of standardized test scores are just as subjective and that they do not measure what we think they do.
Being likewise a realist, I will see to it that my daughter knows how to take a standardized test should she ever need to. But I will also do my best to get her where she needs and wants to go without having to take one. And I will be having her read a couple of the books about the history of testing and college admissions so that she is quite sure that whatever number comes out of the Great Testing Machine attached to her name, that is by no means the measure of her intelligence or her worth.
I read this article with interest as well. Standardized testing as a “necessary evil” seems to be the accepted complaint among parents during SOL (Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests) season. All local field trips are aimed to the test, all projects, all quizzes, etc. are aimed at the test. They work towards the tests all year, but then are left with a month of wasted space where they must not teach (this is what my many teacher friends tell me) but show videos to the kids in order to fulfill their instructional classroom time. Ludicrous!
Great post. As someone who is very good at standardized tests, I’ve always realized that there the test is often assessing test-taking ability more than anything else. Luckily for me, I’ve got that ability. But I’ve always thought of them as an annoying hoop to jump through and not a measure of true knowledge.
You might be interested in this book reviewed in The Washington Post yesterday. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Grades-Misadventures-Standardized-Industry/dp/098170915X/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258974385&sr=8-7. I have it on my list to read.
I just read an article about formative vs. summative assessments (the latter being what standardized tests are)….here is an excerpt:
“The massive emphasis on external, standardized exams, often with high stakes attached as with the federal No Child Left Behind law, has intensified the domination of summative tests over curriculum and instruction — even though the research examined by Black and William supports the conclusion that summative assessments tend to have a negative effect on student learning….”
Great. So all public schools are now gearing everything toward summative NCLB tests, and the research is indicating this has a negative effect on student learning. Sigh. We as a country circle the drain a little bit faster.
For anyone who’s interested, here is the link to the article:
http://www.fairtest.org/value-formative-assessment-pdf
It will be interesting to see if this recession drives more people to homeschool (fewer dollars for public school).
It was the other way round in Massachusetts. We were told that the MCAS would just be used to compare schools, not as a measure of how individual students did, but within a year, one year, they had changed to using it to measure individual students and shortly thereafter, it became a school-leaving exam.
-Nan
We test here every year, it’s the law in our state. In fact, Brian Ray used my tester in the report that he completed last year, Homeschool Progress Report, 2009, so our kids scores were part of the results. I thought that was really neat.
I think homeschooling has a great advantage over classroom students in learning how to ace these tests. We can prepare our kids for standardized tests much faster than a classroom teacher can. For one of our children I bought a test preparation book and sample test and we flew through it 20 minute segments over a week or two. The test prep books are a spring board for other tips and hints that you give the child.
Now that our daughter is in a selective private college and our son is competing for acceptance in selective schools, I am glad we emphasized the standardized test. It gets them “in”. It just does. Our son was given preferred admission to two private universities in the Pacific NW based just on test scores – no fees, no essays, no teacher recommendations, and acceptance letters in two weeks of receiving his documents. So “you get it back” in a sense. The work and money spent on SAT test prep starts to pay dividends even in the admissions process. Since then, he has been invited to compete for a full ride at one of these. For kids who win these, that’s big pay back.
We think test taking should be one of the skills that we teach our kids, along with study skills, student organization – portfolio and portable file system – and time management – using a planner for long term planning. Our kids took about 10 practice SATs and three with College Board. When you add 7 more achievement tests to that and the PSAT, that’s 21 tests. And it hasn’t hurt learning at all, it has enhanced their academic profile.
If you wanna play the game, you gotta do it by the rules. That goes for transcripts, grades, the whole thing. We must speak their language. Learning to do this as early as possible in your child’s education will help them.
I’d say, no matter what you think might happen, plan that college is the goal. For most kids, this will not be a hindrance should college not pan out, but if you do not prepare them for college admission, doors will be closed to them. And those yearly standardized tests are part of the preparation.
Sandra
Sandra,
That is very good food for thought, especially for those of us in the beginning stages of homeschooling. I live in New Jersey, where no testing is required. I might be tempted to bypass it, but now I can see there are some good reasons to test and to teach our children how to take these tests. Thanks for the post!