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NEA News

New Book Scrutinizes National Obsession with 'The Test'

As the backlash against standardized testing intensifies and Congress begins rewriting NCLB, Anya Kamenetz's book couldn't arrive at a better time.
Published: February 10, 2015

When Anya Kamenetz began writing a book about standardized testing's grip on public education, she couldn't have known it would hit bookstores precisely when the future of assessments and accountability was being debated across the nation.  The timing couldn't be better. Not only has the backlash against overtesting intensified over the past year, but recent action in Congress on No Child Left Behind has pivoted largely around whether to limit standardized testing. In The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing - But You Don't Have to Be, Kamenetz, National Public Radio's lead education blogger and author of several previous books, makes a compelling case against the current testing regime, but also presents a framework of potential alternatives that could foster real teaching and learning in the classroom.

Kamenetz recently spoke with NEA Today about the obsession with testing, the role of parents in the debate, and finding a new path forward on assessment and accountability. 

In The Test, you approach the issue of overtesting as a journalist obviously, but also as a concerned parent. When you began the book, were parents always a key audience? 

Anya Kamenetz: Well, there was a personal motivation in that my daughter is three years old, and I want to send her to public school. I want to feel good about that choice. A lot of the parents I spoke with have a lot of problems with the way schools are working – even in places that are famous for their schools - and that was because of the focus on tests. So that's really where I stand.

It always a good idea for parents to get involved in the cause of public education. It really is the place where it makes the most sense to be engaged in our democracy. If you have kids in school, you're committed. And now is a particularly good time now for parents to get involved.

The opposition to standardized testing has gained traction in recent years. To what extent do you attribute that to growing resentment against these tests from parents?

 AK: Some of the smartest observers I interviewed said that it's middle-class parents specifically that can really sway this issue. This is the group in America that holds a large amount of political power. It's really now that there are parents with high property values in affluent areas that are getting upset about these tests and they really hold the potential to change the conversation.

So it's encouraging but we shouldn't get too complacent because this moment could end in a number of ways, and certainly there are divides among parents - even among those who have formed alliances around testing.

Anya_Kamenetz_The_Test Anya Kamenetz, author of "The Test"

You describe standardized testing as being "universally despised" and yet it's still so entrenched. Is one particular testing interest proving more resilient than others?

AK: It's still really all of them. This is the era of Big Data. For a while now we have had a very large thirst for metrics and numbers to drive our decision-making across all different policy questions. And there's a particular use of testing as a political weapon between politicians who believe the issue with underperforming schools is with underperforming teachers, and we're going to use testing to ferret out exactly who the slackers are and try to get rid of them.  And of course you have the Big Four testing companies, who behave like many other companies who are dependent on government contracts. They're not exactly open to competition and not particularly transparent.

And what makes it easier for the current system to survive is the perception at least that there is little consensus on what should replace it.  

AK: Right, but what's funny to me is that there's no defense of the status quo either. I was sparring on Twitter a few days ago with someone from Achieve.org. He said I was kind of a biased reporter to talk so much about the opposition to testing. So I asked who was defending the status quo of standardized tests? He replied that that was a strawman, that no one defends the status quo. Ok, so if no one is defending the status quo, then where do we stand? We know that we need to change, even though there's not a consensus yet on the alternative.

Much of the book examines different approaches to alternative assessments. You identify three groups of players with different philosophies and strategies, all of whom have something to bring to the table. But you settle on a fourth approach that you call "Team Unicorn." What is it about this approach that you think points us in a better direction?

 AK: It's about assessments in which students complete authentic, engaging tasks that demonstrate higher order thinking and growth. The results of these tasks are very individualized but you would still be gathering data. But it's data that could be shown to anyone and not just left up to an individual's judgement to describe the curb or trajectory of learning. So you're somehow squaring the circle of providing a nuanced and three-dimensional picture of the learning and thinking process and yet doing that in a way that is described with large amounts of data. I do think you need some sort of comparable information that can be used across school systems.

Assessment is a part of good teaching and good learning and assessment and feedback should happen every single day in the classroom. Instead of stopping for a weeks to administer a test, can we instead fold the practice of assessment into the high quality teaching and learning that we do every day in a way that also gives us reportable data.

You write that even a new, beautifully-designed assessment could still be used as as cudgel to punish teachers and schools. What are the changes to accountability that need to be made so that a new system can work on all fronts?

AK: The number one principle, articulated by folks like Linda Darling-Hammond, is multiple measures, that you don't make accountability decisions based on a single metric or outcome. Another really important principle, articulated by Julian Vasquez Heilig, is community accountability or resource accountability. The idea here is instead of what we're doing now, which is only holding schools and teachers accountable for outcomes, we should also be holding districts accountable for inputs. It's recognizing that the inequity of resources in public schools is a really huge problem across the states. And if we don't want zip code to be destiny, we have to be very careful to track exactly what happens in each school in terms of great teachers, materials, programing, curriculum, wrap-around series, and facilities. All that needs to be a part of the accountability picture as well.

There's obviously better ideas on the table, parents are engaged, and no one supposedly is defending the status quo. So are we going to see real change over the next few years?

AK: I maintain a level of optimism in that when my daughter starts first grade in couple of years,  I will be able to feel good about the school that she is in and that improvements in assessments can be made. But will the whole system be transformed or reconstituted on a totally different level of quality and access and transparency?  No, I'm not holding my breath for that.  You look at the history of education reform in the United States and you see the constant rotation around an axis that never really ends up in a very different place. The persistence of poverty, the reoccurrence of segregation - these are issues our grandparents were dealing with and our grandchildren will be dealing with them as well.

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The National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest professional employee organization, is committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA's 3 million members work at every level of education—from pre-school to university graduate programs. NEA has affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across the United States.