Are Standards Strangling Our Students?

There is a conflict waging today in education. Concerns about tests scores and reports of low achievement in U.S. schools clash with heated rhetoric of frustrated teachers blaming standards and testing as the enemies of all that is fine in education, peppered by rallying cries that "what the education world needs is a few strong administrators and teachers and parents to join together, proclaiming, 'Enough is enough....we're mad as a hell, and we're not going to do this anymore' (Ohanian 4).

On one side is the high stakes testing movement, whose advocates believe that a stern course of yearly assessment tests with high-stakes is the only way to hold students across the nation accountable for achievement. Sanctioned by our government with the passing of No Child Left Behind, it is widespread and powerful. With each passing year, state legislators put more and more faith into these tests, creating a nation that tests its students more than almost any other industrialized nation (Amerein & Berliner 11).

On the other side is a growing movement of educators who favor student centered learning or constructivism, which targets students' interests as they build meaning through experiential learning. This movement objects to tests on the grounds they impose standards upon those who are not "standard"; that teaching to the test is narrowing the curriculum, thereby diluting the quality of our students education, excluding students with special needs, and that the increased stress of passing these yearly tests are robbing students of an important, vital aspect of being a student and experiencing education.

In the middle of this contest is the increasing amount of students who are diagnosed with special needs or classified with learning disabilities. For just a snap-shot: a recent study showed that since 1990, the number of children as well as adults diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, (ADD), rose from nine thousand to nearly five billion (Ohanian, 20). Ironically enough, an explosion in the administration of Ritalin and other drugs to help "control kids who can't control themselves" coincides with this explosion of standardized tests and high stakes tests (20).

Teachers and students alike feel the pressure to "hurry up" and meet the standards. Kindergartens eliminate recess, middle class white kids are labeled "Learning Disabled", poor African-Americans labeled "pre-delinquent", (21), and they both get the pill: all in the mad rush to achieve a certain score on an assessment test no one will ever remember. Also ironically, in the midst of the rising inclusion dilemma, curriculums are asking more out of students than ever, introducing concepts in the classroom a year or two earlier than twenty-five years prior (21). It's easy to see how special needs students "get in the way" of this rush for "achievement".

Many educational organizations urge caution in making high-stakes testing the sole assessment of a student's achievement. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics acknowledges the need for tests, but they state that "basing major decisions about students, teachers, schools, or instructional programs on a single test is inappropriate and inconsistent with what we know about learning and assessment" (NCTM 1). The NCTM feels tests provide only a "snapshot" capturing one context, rather than encompassing a wide variety of contexts; they should be among several measures of evaluation (1).

The position statement for the International Reading Association goes further. They express the concern testing has become a means of "controlling instruction", as opposed to gathering information, helping students become better readers (IRA 2). Especially concerning is that assessment tests are often multiple choice tests. They are considered to be high stakes, yet their multiple choice format does not yield enough information to make important instructional decisions in the classroom (3), nor do they allow room for alternative modes of learning.

Like the NCTM, they recognized testing has its place in the curriculum, but as only one type of educational assessment. The IRA defines assessment as "the systematic, purposeful collection of data to inform actions", and that from an educator's point of view, the primary purpose of assessment is to help students by providing information about how instruction can be improved (3). Their problem with testing as a sole assessor of achievement is that involves the "systematic sampling of behavior under controlled conditions" (3). Tests are imperfect, students are imperfect, and basing high-stakes decisions on limited and imperfect information can have many ramifications.

The IRA also echoes fears that a classroom defined by tests and high stakes assessments narrows the curriculum, putting too much classroom priority on the test itself (4). Schools should address a wide range of learning, rather than forcing teachers to succumb to the pressure of focusing their efforts on activities believed to improve high-stakes scores (4).

In answer to these oppositions and concerns, constructivism, student-centered learning, and alternative assessments have all been championed as viable alternatives to a high stakes testing atmosphere, but the most important issue is to cut through all the rhetoric and ask a simple question: does it work? Are alternative assessments valid tools for measuring student learning, and does constructivism lead to actual student learning?

Constructivism is a theory of learning that holds the learner in the central role and a practice of schooling that is based on an understanding of the learner's needs. Constructivism's main argument is that not all students learn things at the same rate (Brooks & Brooks 161), and that making them do so is foolish and unrealistic. Constructivism focuses on knowledge construction, not knowledge re-production, (Foreman 1), a potential danger of a skill-drill high stakes classroom.

Constructivists function on the premise that an individual learner must actively build knowledge and skills, the information they gain coming not from external stimuli, (teachers, textbooks, tests/quizzes), but from processing external stimuli and the resulting cognitive structures they produce, (Huitt 1), because true knowledge is built from one's experiences (Foreman 1). The following principles are paramount: instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts making the student willing and able to learn, (called readiness to learn), instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student, instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps, going beyond the information given (2).

The major flaw of high-stakes accountability systems and their ramifications for students is that schools have put their faith in a failed equation: State Standards = State Tests; State Tests Results = Student Achievement; Student Achievement = Real Leaning à Rewards and Punishments, rather setting standards for individual professional practice for teachers, and then developing different school districts' varied capacities for student learning (Brooks & Brooks, 161). Through this equation, teachers are not being held accountable for student learning, only test scores, and the focus on this type of achievement severely limits knowledge and expression.

A compelling example is given by Brooks and Brooks that is not necessarily linked directly to the issue of testing, but
is certainly an endorsement of a learner-centered classroom. A teacher asks 7^th graders to reflect on a poem, and asked to interpret the first two lines. A student raises his hand, saying they make him think of a dream. The teacher says, "No, that's not what the author meant." Another student says the poem reminds her of a voyage at sea, and the teacher responds, "Remember, we are thinking about the first two lines of the poem, not the whole poem", and that the poem wasn't about the sea (165). At this point, no other students felt like answering, and the teacher proceeded to tell the students what the author meant in the poem.

This teacher failed to help the students construct meaning, because she communicated there was an interpretation to the poem, she knew it, and only hers was right (165). In this case, the quest of the students shifted from interpreting the meaning of the poem itself, to figuring out what the teacher would accept as an answer (165), and most of them became frustrated with this approach because it was less about what they knew, more about what the teacher knew.

High-stakes testing proponents claim that a constructivist class is too easily hijacked by student and teacher's whims, that their curriculums "lacked rigor; teachers cast aside information and facts for preferences" (166). However, if organized efficiently, a constructivist classroom does not abandon facts and information, but simply takes into account students' prior experiences and interests to open a dialogue between the information a teacher has to pass on and a receptive learner who has now had things made relevant to them and their experiences (166). A high-stakes testing classroom can just as easily be hijacked - by the desire for a teacher to make everything the "same, standard" - and let's be honest, it's much less work to teach to a test and spread uniform education than it is to try and meet the varying needs of twenty-some different students, especially those with IEP's and other special needs.

High stakes testing and assessments completely misses the mark on this note, especially: it is an absolute fallacy, a fraud, even - to believe that all students are going to learn all things at the same time; there's no need for research or in-depth studies to prove this, it's common sense. This becomes so much more important when applied to inclusive schooling, because how many wildly intelligent students are out there who simply don't test well. If asked orally, these students can recount the information right back, they can perform hands-on task, they can do things well that some students who are good testers would struggle with. High stakes testing and assessment simply asks the impossible: for all students to be the same, think the same, and grow at the same rates: it does not allow room for the student who is "different", much less a student who is disabled.

Works Cited

1. Amrein, A.L. & Berliner, D.C. (2002, March 28). High Stakes Testing, uncertainty, and student learning Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/

2. Brooks, Martin G.; Brooks, Jacqueline G. "The Courage to be Constructivist" Taking Sides. Ed. James Williams. Mcgraw-Hill, 2005, Dubuque, Iowa

3. "Constructivism As A Theory" http://online.sfsu.edu/~foreman/itec800/finalprojects/eitankaplan/pages/home.htm

4. "High Stakes Assessments in Reading: A Position Statement of the International Reading Association". International Reading Association 2006 http://www.reading.org/resources/issues/positions_high_stakes.html

5. "High Stakes Test: A Position of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics" National Council of Teachers of Mathematics January 2006 http://www.nctm.org/about/position_statements/highstakes.htm

6. Ohanian, Susan. One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Heinemann 1999