A Case AGAINST Standardized Testing

‪#‎lesstests‬
If you follow me at all, then you know that I am a HUGE advocate for child-led learning, self-directed learning, integrated learning, collaborative learning...you get the idea. 

I haven't written about my massive beef with the Common Core Standards, or it's tag-along - standardized testing. But with new legislation potentially coming about regarding mandatory testing, and the article below about the need for testing, I'm raising my voice.

Whether you are in the public school system, homeschool, or private school, standardized testing issues effect your children. Many states require all students, including homeschooling students, to take standardized tests and there is a push in other states for this as well. Given that the standardized tests are being revised to be in-line with common core, along with the ACT and SAT, it puts students who have not been taught the common core way at a huge testing disadvantage. 

I do assessments with my students, but the reason I do them, is because of the need for my students to have them for THE SCHOOL SYSTEM. I am currently doing school applications for my pre-k's, and the schools they are applying to, or going to, want their assessments. Since they are all well above grade level, if I did not do assessments to prove their abilities, then they wouldn't receive the proper placements and support services they deserve.

Do I need them as their teacher? Absolutely not. 

However, the reason for these assessments is to show their new teacher their skill set, because otherwise she'd just have to take my word for it, the parent's word, or simply wait long enough to be able to make such a judgement on her own. Testing has its place, and this is one of them, to show relevant information to the child's benefit. Another is to prove mastery for more rapid advanced, especially for gifted and advanced students.  

To give you an idea of the RIGHT direction in education, here is the title of an article that I love, love, LOVE:

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?
The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

 And one of the best parts of the entire article reads: [emphasis by me]

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, 

Is the U.S. learning from Finland? Evidently not based upon this new article.

 Paper | January 8, 2015

The Case for Annual Testing

By: Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, Martin R. West, Matthew M. Chingos and Mark Dynarski

If you click on the links for each of the authors of this article, you will find they are all with the Brown Center on Education Policy and each specializes in assessments and testing. Do they have a horse in this race? Yes.

Education officials in Maryland estimated in a report last month that it will require $100 million to upgrade computers statewide to support the testing that is the centerpiece of Common Core. Georgia and California are also finding that costs are too high to implement Common Core, with the latter estimated to spend approximately $35 million per year, or about $30 per student, in testing costs alone.

The study by Accountability Works, the Maryland-based nonprofit education advocacy group, estimated that schools nationwide will need $6.87 billion for technology, $5.26 billion for professional development, $2.47 billion for textbooks and $1.24 billion for assessment testing over the first seven years that Common Core is in effect.

Why? Why, why, WHY, can the U.S. not learn from our mistakes and stop riding the corporate B.S.?

The article pushes the need for test scores to make the schools accountable, to basically rank schools, to assess programs, to track student progress, etc. The overlying theme is CONTROL and MONEY. What I don't hear in there, anywhere is a true desire to impact the LEARNING experience. There is SO much information available as to how children and teens learn best, the best environments, the best teaching practices, collaborative learning, etc. Yet class sizes continue to increase. Arts and humanities decrease as testing demands increase. Recess and gym times are eliminated and ADHD diagnoses skyrocket. 

Common Core was written by people with a financial interest - text book publishers, software and hardware owners, and testing companies. It was never vetted, never beta tested, and created from a top down approach to educational skill sets from the college level. There were no early childhood or elementary educators, neurologists or psychologists included in the creation of the standards, many of which are developmentally inappropriate. It was also never approved by several of the committee members in developmental process, who said it failed to meet, let alone exceed, the standards needed for the U.S. to be competitive on the world stage.

Because the state standards were developed by three private Washington, D.C.-based organizations — the National Governors Association, The Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve Inc.— and all funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stotsky said she finds herself “in the position of constantly contradicting one of the major talking points,” which are that the standards are state-led. 

 Because they are all private organizations, there is nothing to request under the Freedom of Information Act for detail.

“There was no way anyone could ever get information from any of these organizations about why anyone was appointed to the committees, what their charge was, what they were paid,” Stotsky said. “To this day, you can't find out why people were chosen for the committees they were put on to create the standards and why the chief writers were chosen.”

“To expose kids and impose that much time on testing is an abuse of the children and does not serve good educational purposes,” she said. 

- Sandra Stotsky. Originally part of the Common Core Validation Committee and one of five who refused to sign off on Common Core State Standards.

I have a friend whose child's kindergarten teacher was already saying that the child would most likely be kept back a year due to his inability to memorize his sight words. He is a young 5 year old. This was said after the FIRST 9 WEEKS OF KINDERGARTEN. His poor mother said that both she and her son were in tears at night, spending hours with flash cards and drilling the sight word lists. The poor little boy began to have anxiety issues and stomach aches.

Pushing skill levels down to the lowest grades when a child is developmentally INCAPABLE of the skill is abuse. Yes, ABUSE!

This would bring it in line with the overwhelming evidence showing that starting school later is best, and the practice in many countries, such as Sweden and Finland. These countries have better academic achievement and child well-being, despite children not starting school until age 7. - Waldorf Research Institute 

While many children can read early, it is not until the age of 7-8, when all children enter what Piaget termed the Concrete Operational Stage, after a brain maturation, that pretty much ALL children can learn to read. Many are not developmentally ready until the age of 8, an age when many countries BEGIN reading instruction, including those with the highest test scores, when most children can be successful without stressful drilling and memorization. 

Why do I mention this? Because the reason we are pushing children to perform at levels they are developmentally incapable of performing is due to the Common Core Standards and the constant TESTING that goes along with the standards.

All learning until age 8, developmentally, should be hands-on and interactive. Drill and kill is NOT developmentally appropriate. 

Even for gifted children, Common Core is causing a great deal of anxiety and failure. Children who simply KNOW things, are now being required to explain their answers, when they have no explanation, and being marked as a failure for being smart. They are being required to show tedious, repetitious procedures for finding a simple answer that they already know. For many gifted children, this is tortuous. Rather than excelling, they are being dragged under by unnecessary tasks, often due to preparation for testing requirements. 

Not only are the skills inappropriate to developmental level, but the testing is now computer based. Kindergartens to even third graders are not only often cognitively incapable of performing the skills, but their fine motor and computer knowledge is often incapable of performing the requirements for testing. 

Stories abound of children being ill, stressed and emotionally traumatized by the testing process and pressure.

Such downward pressure risks undermining children’s motivation and their disposition to learn, thus lowering rather than raising levels of achievement in the long term. . . . Inappropriate formalized assessment of children at an early age currently results in too many children being labelled as failures, when the failure, in fact, lies with the system. - Waldorf Research Institute

Teachers being evaluated based upon test scores means that no matter how much they may not want to push children, their own skins are on the line. 

The amount of testing is ridiculous, it's not even ANNUAL testing. In the article Testing Overload in America's Schools it states:

Students are tested as frequently as twice per month and an average of once per month. Our analysis found that students take as many as 20 standardized assessments per year and an average of 10 tests in grades 3-8. The regularity with which testing occurs, especially in these grades, may be causing students, families, and educators to feel burdened by testing.  

There is a huge misconception that the U.S. is "behind" other countries in education. This is based upon fallacies created through the strategic interpretation of TESTING DATA. However:

• Many countries only test their top students, or only report their top scores. The U.S. tests and reports all.
• Many countries lack diversity in their populations, so they do not have the levels of language and cultural barriers to education that the U.S. possesses.
• Many countries such as Finland, do not test annually, so only those that take the final test and graduate are compared to the U.S. not giving an accurate comparison over the schooling years.
• Many countries do not include special needs students in testing. The U.S. does.
• Testing in many countries is not the high-stress, one-size-fits-all testing like we do here. Children who are relaxed and simply asked to do their best, will always score higher.  
• Many countries are smaller than most of our states. The diversity of our populations, incomes, and economical challenges are vast in comparison. A composite score does not reflect the high educational abilities of a majority of the states.

It's NOT apples-to-apples comparisons. 

There are reasons, very good ones, why we have so many students from other countries in our school systems and universities. There are very good reasons why so many foreign parents want to move here for their child's education. 

The government and corporate interests want to continually build a crisis to support their own agendas. United States schools are not at all okay, but many of the problems stem DIRECTLY from the government interference and mandates fueled by special interests and corporate greed who are pushing their own agenda and the testing initiatives.

Teachers don't need testing to determine where their students are at. They know. We need to trust our educators and let the teachers TEACH. We need to let children develop, grow and learn at their own pace with a love of learning and avid curiosity. 

Human beings are hard wired from birth with an innate desire to learn and explore.

Learning should be integrated. Testing individual skill sets on such a regular basis demands that teaching subjects be compartmentalized, taking away the organic nature of learning. Until we get business men, government and corporations, out of education and let the psychologists, neurologists and educators have control, then we will continue to marginalize the learning students are truly capable of achieving.
‪#‎lesstests‬

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 Tags: common core, testing, standardized testing, homeschooling, elementary, teaching, teachers,