High-stakes testing has to go. These tests have negative affects on achievement. High-stakes testing has negative affects on student social-emotional health. Testing creates negative affects on a school’s climate. I could go on and on.

Consequently, these are just a few concerns about high-stakes testing that led me years ago to call for these tests to be eliminated. These should raise alarm bells, but since 2002 all of these concerns are highlighted in schooling today. Furthermore, it’s not a pretty picture. There are too many unintended consequences.

Anxious and Apprehensive

There are hundreds of thousands of students who see school apprehensively.

Recently I talked with a 15 year old high school student about how she feels about high-stakes testing. She is a top notch student. AP and honors classes at a Georgia high school. She said that she’s always stressed and anxious about these tests. They seem to never end. Her story is the tip of the iceberg about the effect of the nation’s tilt and partiality to use tests to penalize students. There are hundreds of thousands of students who see school apprehensively. Some are worried sick. Many are afraid, uptight, and sweating bullets about the consequences of not doing well on these competitions. You might to check out this blog post on the effects of testing: Testing sucks the breath out of teaching and learning.

Unjust Decision

High-stakes testing was a huge unjust decision made by the Bush Administration in 2002. It was tied to the No Child Left Behind Act. States were held accountable using high-stakes tests. Then, along came the Common Core Standards. In the opinion of many educators, the Common Core standards and high-stakes tests (assessments)  were conceived and developed in an undemocratic and authoritarian manner. You can read my position on the undemocratic nature of testing and standards. But there is more to the issue than this.

Claims Made

We conclude that the available evidence does not give strong support for the use of test-based incentives to improve education…

Claims were made that using high-stakes tests would motivate students and schools to improve not only achievement, but things such as drop out rates. Yet, research study after research study does not support these contentions, as you can see here, and here.

A major study on Incentives and High-Stakes Testing was completed by the National Research Council. One of their conclusions is:

…there have been a number of careful efforts to use test-based incentives to improve education. They have included broadly implemented government policies—notably, state high school exit exams and the school-level requirements of NCLB and its predecessors—as well as experimental programs. A number of these programs have been carefully studied, using research designs that allow some level of causal conclusions about their effects. We conclude that the available evidence does not give strong support for the use of test-based incentives to improve education and provides only minimal guidance about which incentive designs may be effective. (italics, mine)

National Research Council 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in
Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
https://doi.org/10.17226/12521, p. 91.

What if we don’t change?

I wrote a story about life in 2053. Skyler is the teenager who tells us what life is like living in Atlanta in mid-century. Apart from the destructive impact of climate change, she explains that there are too many people living in the Eastern part of America. Sea level rise pushed people away from the coasts. They migrated inland.
As a result, people spend most of their time in their apartments. They use the Internet to study math, science, social studies, and language arts. Notice that the curriculum didn’t seem to change, even though everything around people living in the future did change.

Skyer can only go to school 1 day each year. That day is high-stakes testing day. She was not happy about what our politicians did in the first few decades of the new century. She had this to say about school:

I do most of my studies online from my room in our apartment, and my father also helps us (I have three brothers) as a home school teacher.  There are so many courses to choose from, you simply can’t believe it. But, as my father keeps reminding me, I have to take courses that will prepare me for the high-stakes tests, because—well, you know—politicians in the first decade of 2000’s decided that all kids needed to be tested to prove that that their teachers were good or bad, and that their schools were doing the job, not to mention to tell me if I passed or failed.

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In conclusion

In conclusion, high-stakes testing must be reduced in our schools. There is a slight movement in Georgia to reduce end-of-year tests for AP and honors classes. Most students are not in AP or honors classes. All student’s suffer from the unnecessary use of high-stakes tests. There is much more to be done.

My goal is to show why high-stakes testing must go. More to come later.