What if Standardized Testing Took a Holiday?

What if Standardized Testing Took a Holiday?

Several years ago a movie entitled Death Takes a Holiday explored the cultural, spiritual and economic impact of the elimination of death on society.  The short term consequences were not so bad but eventually the suspension of death, an integral part of the cycle of life became a necessary evil for the societies survival.

Maybe a moratorium on standardized testing (which is not as integral a part of learning) wouldn’t be so bad either for the short term.  Here are a few of the benefits that immediately come to mind:

• More time for quality instruction focused on what is being taught
• Less time spent on test prep

• More attention to the development of individual student skills
• Less time being spent on rote learning.

• More creative teaching and student engagement
• Less disaffected students and teachers

• More attention to student growth over time
• Less emphasis on ranking schools, students and their teachers

• More assessments designed by educators
• Fewer assessments designed by proprietary test preparation companies.

While there is no doubt that concerns for accountability and transparency would eventually need to be addressed what would be the harm of taking a pause and ensuring that we are getting things right.  Teaching to the test is terribly important only if we are sure that what we are testing is important.

For decades schools relied on testing that was locally developed and complemented with the professional judgments of teachers who intimately new their students strengths and weaknesses.  Even today teacher opinion is more valued by parents concerned about their students’ performance more than the statistics resulting from most standardized tests.

If standardized testing is such an essential part of the educational process why has the decline of our schools correlated to our increasing reliance on standardized testing as the measure of a schools success?  They simply confirm what we already know. Some schools are doing well and others are doing poorly.  Our preoccupation with testing steals time, money, energy and focus from what we really need to do to in order to improve.

The role of standardized testing has taken on an importance beyond its intended purpose and its value. Pretending that it hasn’t is both disappointing and worrisome.

Let’s let the real educators get back to work.