The trouble many educators have with the notion of standardized testing is that there are so many other factors the tests do not and cannot take into account.
If we want to compare student performance to that of other students, or class performance or even school performance to that of other schools, standardized testing is inadequate.
Let’s consider some people who have competed in a 100-metre race: Walid Ktila, Hannah Lucy Cockcroft, Usain Bolt, Florence Griffith-Joyner and Man Kaur.
Bolt did it in 2009 in 9.58 seconds, a time even he was not able to match in 2016 in Rio.
The women’s world record of 10.49 seconds was set by Griffith-Joyner in 1988 and remains unbroken.
Much slower was Ktila, a Tunisian athlete who took 15.69 seconds. Cockcroft was even slower at 17.31 in 2014.
Last week, Kaur took a full one minute and 21 seconds to make it across the finish line.
Theoretically, without taking anything else into account and using the same logic we use with student performance, we’d have to rate Bolt’s and Joyner’s performances as an A+.
Maybe Ktila would rate a C- and Cockcroft a D.
As for Kaur, an F seems cruel but really — one minute and 21 seconds? Very slow.
Yet we rate kids and classes, and sometimes whole schools, against some statistical average we call “the standard,” calculated by written tests.
To do that is like ignoring the fact that Ktila, who suffers from cerebral palsy, covered his 100 metres in a wheelchair and became world Paralympic champion. His 15.69 seconds was faster than many of us could run 100 metres on our best day.
Cockcroft also clocked her world-class time in a wheelchair.
But what about Kaur? Well, she is 100 years old and last week finished her event breathing a little heavily and looking for a sip of water.
Comparing these athletes on a time standard alone would obviously be ridiculous.
If it was just all about time, Bolt wins. If it was guts and determination to overcome life’s obstacles, we’d award Ktila and Cockcroft the prizes.
And for sheer inspiration for the rest of us, it would have to be Kaur.
Same event — different expectations, different achievements and different factors defining success, none of which can be measured by performance averages.
Writing for the Washington Post last year, Marion Brady, teacher and author of many textbooks, listed many things, beginning with original thought, that are not measured by standardized testing.
Standardized tests, he wrote, “emphasize minimum achievement to the neglect of maximum performance.”
James Popham, emeritus professor in the UCLA graduate school of education and information studies, writing in the highly regarded Educational Leadership, echoed that concern.
Popham observed that “if a school’s standardized test scores are high, people think the school’s staff is effective. If a school’s standardized test scores are low, they see the school’s staff as ineffective. In either case … educational quality is being measured by the wrong yardstick.”
In other words, if time alone were the “yardstick” for success in a 100-metre event, everybody except Bolt and Griffith-Joyner could be regarded as “ineffective.”
Arthur Costa, emeritus professor at California State University, summed up what he regards as current test-based madness with “what was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure.”
An electronic quartz timing system was introduced in international events in 1964, thereby improving timing accuracy to 0.01 of a second. The computerized timing used in events today has increased the accuracy to 0.001 of a second.
Nobody can argue with that degree of accuracy, but quartz timing does not measure or even begin to tell us about the real significance what Ktila, Cockcroft or Kaur achieved.
In the same way, over-reliance on standardized testing as indicators of student performance does not tell teachers what they really need to know about the learning capabilities of the kids they are teaching.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
