This is not a defense of standardized testing.
Really.
Any teacher who teaches only to the test, or any district that tries limiting its teachers to doing so, is surely misguided. But the occasional misguided or lazy teacher doesn't mean the tests are themselves the problem.
That also doesn't mean the tests are unimpeachable. As a classroom teacher, I am all too aware of how the current NCLB-engendered reliance on standardized tests can pervert a solid, well-designed curriculum. (I'm somewhat immune, because I teach government and economics in Arizona, where we don't have a state exam in social studies, but raising scores drives everything we are doing in our school improvement process, and the folks teaching English and Math to sophomores are directly in the firing line.)
But the fact that an almost exclusive reliance on standardized testing can skew what happens in classrooms, doesn't mean it necessarily skews what's going on.
It's kinda like hearing people quote the Bible as saying "money is the root of all evil," when Saint Paul really wrote, "For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Close, sure, but not really the same thing, is it?
Now I don't claim to be smart enough to understand the whole testing debate, but from a classroom teacher's perspective, it seems like everyone ought to relax and start with the things reasonable people can agree on:
Standardized tests stink as a way to evaluate students. Very little we do in life is going to involve filling in bubble sheets. Many students who can give a great oral presentation, make pertinent observations in class and write insightfully given adequate time, just don't do well on tests focused on recall and recitation. And by definition, "standardization" means the test cannot be adjusted to reflect geographic, socioeconomic or other differences.
The tests are getting better, and the shift to common core standards should move us up Bloom's ladder in ways that open up performance possibilities for those students mentioned above. We use the TAP system for evaluating teachers in my school -- most schools will soon use TAP or something similar -- and the shift to common core is starting to make sense to our faculty. To the extent that the state exams (AIMS in Arizona) assess basic academic skills, skills that apply across the curriculum, they're not so bad.
Standardized tests also stink as a way to evaluate teachers. Not everything teachers do is measurable right away, and teacher quality is not necessarily causally related to improved student learning. Without going all Kumbaya on you, we are forming minds and bodies, and some of the seeds a good teacher plants may not germinate for years. Besides, a teacher can teach the hell out of something, and a particular student still not get it on test day.
Anybody got a better idea than tests? You know, a workable one? It'd be great to have a corps of trained evaluators fan out across the country to conduct one-on-one interviews with every student and teacher, providing inter-rater reliability on a grand scale. But who's going to pay for it? And whom are you going to hire? We already lose too many teachers to administration and non-education careers; are we also going to pull out thousands more to staff our evaluation corps?
We need a little Solutionism around here. We're educators, which means we're at least a little smart, and a little educated, so we ought to try finding a solution accepting the level of standardization that's unavoidable because we're a big country with a lot of students, while still preserving the kind of human-scale assessment that any decent teacher applies to her students. (I'm stealing the idea of solutionism -- "the belief that, together, science and humanity can solve anything" -- so go to http://www.draftfcb.com/work-detail.aspx?work=453 for details on the original idea.)
See, I'm not defending standardized testing, I'm just not sure there's much in the way of an alternative.
So, short answer: testing students is an okay, if limited, way to evaluate students. It's not useful for evaluating teachers, and trying to use it that way makes it less accurate in evaluating students.
Wow, how did we get all the way to the moon and into the information age without all of the standardized testing in place today? I guess you didn't know that Finland, which the Fordham Institute has rated as having the best ed system in the world, uses almost NO standardized tests. Too bad we never seem to want to follow the example of other successful nations. (But there is a lot of money to be made creating tests, hardware and software to keep track of all that test data, test prep materials, remedial materials to be used when the students don't pass, etc., etc. and those corporations make a lot of political contributions directly and indirectly...)
If accountability was shifted to the local level, meaningful assessment would replace standardized assessment. Schools serve the communities they are in - why not make them accountable at that level, not at the state and federal levels?
“However, if you knew what I knew about the [testing] industry, you would be aghast at the idea of a standardized test as the deciding factor in the future of even one student, teacher, district, or state. I, personally, am utterly dumbstruck by the possibility. The idea that education policy makers want to ignore the assessments of the classroom teachers who spend every day with this country’s students to instead hear the opinion of some testing company (often “for-profit”) enterprises in a distant state is, in my opinion, asinine. It is ludicrous.” (Farley, 2009, p. ix-x).
In California, despite the clear statement on the testing website not to, I see school after school using testing data for cohort analysis and value-added purposes.
I agree with Farley, place the accountability and assessment in the hand of the teacher, school and district. Standards can be state or national, but keep the accountability as local as possible.
3) There is no massive crisis for which endless tests are the answer. US kids were #1 in the world in number of top level performers on the last PISA reading test and last PISA math test. Also, adjusting for poverty, US average scores were #1 in the world on the last PISA reading test. American education has real improvements to make, but high stakes testing has failed everywhere it has been tried. It is a central obstacle to quality education, and we are wasting billions of dollars and billions of classroom hours on test that are simply unnecessary. High school graduation tests have no proven benefits--get rid of them--use the money to get high school teachers more planning time so they can better individualize education for the crazy number of students you folks teach.
Teachers, kids and families were all better off before the testing craze started, and that's why China is trying to escape the grips of test-driven education while we, oddly, embrace it. Go back to relying on teacher evaluations of kids and principal and teacher leader supervision and feedback to teachers. With the time saved from testing and test prep, make better information available to families about what kids are doing. Do matrix sampling of kids from a school, and have them do a standardized test battery each year--so there's some external tool that could potentially spot (I'm being generous) problems.
I'm a little confused about your post, because you never established a legitimate purpose that high-stakes standardized tests are serving.
1) Teachers don't need a standardized test to tell them what students are learning: Teachers of young children are just as good at identifying who will have reading problems as the tests are, and high school grades have been found to be better predictors of long-term college success than are college entrance exams. Much of what matters most is not on the test, much of what is on the tests doesn't matter much in the long run, most causes of rising and falling scores are factors other than the teacher, and faster test score gains often signal poorer teaching, not better teaching.
2) Teaching to tests (even supposedly good tests) corrupts the whole idea of real education. The right reasons for learning are personal (curiosity, mastery) and social (to learn enough to help cure cancer, because Uncle Joe died of cancer). Putting testing at the heart of education undermines healthy motivation, and makes kids harder and harder to educate every year--it's just not an authentic reason to learn, and they know it. Kids forget material faster when they learn it just to learn it, and focusing on performance and correct answers (instead of learning itself) changes kids' motivation in three unhealthy ways.
What we teachers desperately need is help designing curricula that equips students to pass mandated exams while still teaching them what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story", AND giving us the emotional and institutional support to do so.
NCLB is an utter failure and an absolute disaster.
How can we move away from "standardized" and still test the tens of millions of students in the country? If we could find a way to move toward (all the way to individuation is probably impossible) a good test, we'd be doing a good thing.