A few days ago the Superintendent of the Atlanta public school system was indicted in relation to a cheating scandal involving herself and principals and teachers throughout the city. Unlike the scandal recently exposed at New York's prestigious Stuyvesant High School, the scandal in Atlanta did not involve students, but school representatives who altered tests to improve student scores. Ironically, the massive improvements in the students' scores may have actually cost the system money; having such great numbers meant that some schools were no longer eligible for state or federal aid. But obviously, the purpose of the cheating was to demonstrate that the superintendent was doing her job of turning around a troubled system.
Atlanta is not the only city where school officials have cooked the books, and it is pretty easy to see some correlation between an increased emphasis on standardized tests to measure school performance and cheating. As economic futures become determined by a single test, a lot of people will feel the pressure to make sure they don't get sent to the chopping block.
But this kind of problem doesn't just happen in elementary and secondary education. The phrase "cooked the books" is of course an accounting term, and the scandals involving Enron and its accounting firm should also be considered in this light. Why do corporations cook their books? For much the same reason that school officials would alter tests. Companies have responsibilities to their stockholders, and they too are under pressure to succeed. (Okay, such corporate heads are in a better position to screw their stockholders and walk away with gobs of cash, but often unethical and illegal behavior begins with a sense of responsibility to the mission statement of the company.)
I'm an educator at an institution who trains teachers. I am well aware of the standards my state has set for teacher certification, and if my department cannot get its students to meet those standards, I could lose my job. I am also teaching my students to uphold an important set of core values where one assumes responsibility for one's actions and behaves in an honorable and ethical manner. I don't want them to cheat on their exams, and I don't expect them to permit cheating by their younger charges when they get in front of a classroom.
I'm also the parent of two children in a public school system where how they do on standardized tests will dictate their futures to a significant degree, and I find that prospect frightening and absurd. My kids' teachers spend a lot of time preparing students to take these tests. Are they learning anything besides how to take a test? Some days I have my doubts. Stuyvesant is one of just under a dozen specialized high schools in the city where admission is based on the performance of a single test, and only that test. That's right. It doesn't matter what kind of student my kid is; it doesn't matter that she might have a 98 average in middle school for three years; it doesn't matter that her teachers all think she's brilliant; if her score is high enough, she gets in to the school of her choice, and if she does not, she won't.
The kids who go to these schools get it: the competition is fierce for scholarships, and in the current economy, with students becoming crushed by debt, the drive for a free ride is getting deeper than ever, and the competition for jobs even that much harder. The "win at all costs" mentality has driven us to this point, where students are overworked and overstressed. (And with our recent changes in social mores, I don't know if they are more likely or less likely to start smoking and drinking at earlier ages than my generation did.)
The other insidious aspect about all this testing is that there is an entire industry that profits by these rules. The publishers like Pearson, who have a bigtime contract with New York State, make billions producing tests. States spend about a billion per year administrating tests. Institutions like Kaplan charge thousands of dollars to help students prepare for all sorts of tests, from the classic SATs to the various tests for pre-K students to be admitted to gifted and talented kindergarten programs. A lot of money has been made thanks to these standardized tests. Do our children get what they need from curricula that are based on making sure they pass them?
I don't think so. First of all, the tests themselves are not really very good measurements of students' abilities (nor of their teachers'). You need to invest more in real evaluation systems to get a sense of how good both student and teacher are doing. Second, apart from any specific biases in the tests themselves, there is the cultural and economic bias that is a part of the test-prep industry: parents who have resources both financial and informational can get their kids into test-prep programs and increase their children's chances of success, and those who don't have those resources can't do that. Third, if it were really possible to get all the students to get acceptable scores on these tests, and if it were achieved through massive test preparation in class, then what is the real value of the test? All it means is that the kids can take a test. It doesn't mean they have grown in a psychologically meaningful way, or can form positive relationships, or have the confidence to stand up to bullying, or whatever. The only thing these programs do is prepare them for a world of work that also doesn't particularly care about anything but results.
Those are the hidden costs of all this testing.
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