The great student testing debate continues unabated in Massachusetts with state education officials considering shifting a 10th grade standardized test to the 11th grade or adding an 11th grade test.
At the heart of this debate, according to the State House News Service, is the question of what is the best type of test to mandate students take and pass in order to graduate high school. One side in the argument claims a 10th grade test assesses students’ abilities to graduate. Another side argues testing students closer to graduation helps assess their ability to function in the working world or move on to college.
The test debate has practically worn parents and teachers down to a nub. Teachers complain about “teaching to the test” and turning the school year into an endless cycle of preparing students for the next test.
Parents wonder about the validity of subjecting their kids to one stressful battery of tests after another and urban educators protest state testing methods unfairly lump their students in with suburban counterparts.
Testing and education have probably been uncomfortable bedfellows since the days of the one room schoolhouse. Proctors and Number Two pencils have gone the way of overhead projectors and mimeograph paper. But testing remains the foundation for periodic efforts in Massachusetts and around the nation to reform education.
The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) was designed to bring academic accountability to schools. Its authors pledged to end the practice of allowing students to move up one grade level to another without attaining the basic mathematics, reading and science skills they needed.
Intended to check a student’s project throughout the primary and secondary grades, MCAS ended up mired in controversy and assailed on all sides by test critics. To no one’s surprise, MCAS has fallen out of favor while PARCC – Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers – has become the favored test.
Designed to measure 21st-century competence, PARCC also requires 21st-century essential technology in the form of computers in order to be administered. Like MCAS, it has fallen prey to critics.
There is no perfect way to test students for the simple reason that the American education system is a paradox. On one hand, it is a giant socialization machine that absorbs kids and prepares them to function in the working world by thinking and acting the same way. On the other hand, it is supposed to spur young minds into a lifelong, sometimes solitary, pursuit of knowledge.
The best way to test kids is the one that has worked the longest. Committed teachers must assess their students’ competence on a daily basis and make adjustments in learning techniques and pace to produce young people who are capable of learning but who, at the end of the day, at the end of a school year, want to keep learning.
