SUPPORT HIGH STAKES TESTING

To support high-stakes testing is the smart thing to do, even if it takes some corrects to the program. The high and growing numbers coming out of New York concerning the number of children opting out of what the detractors refer to as high stakes are troublesome. The political tie to Common Core program standards is unfortunate. In my state, North Carolina passed a law not to join the CC program. The legislatures, who wrote the law and voted for it, complained that the sovereignty of the state was at stake. These people said they would substitute their “state” own program. Of course, they do not have nor will they ever have a program. These same legislatures—mental giants to be sure—passed a law to outlaw Sharia Law, suppress minority voters, gerrymandered the state into grotesquely shaped districts, politicized school boards, and otherwise turn our state into a laughing stock by trying to conserve a pre-civil war mentality.

An educated person would be naive to think state sovereignty is what is behind the criticism of high stakes testing. The criticism is multifaceted. For one, the teachers unions bitterly object. The truth is that they object at their peril; people who want to destroy unions are rightly accused them of protecting bad teachers. Union leaders look at high stake testing as a way to evaluate teachers. They are right but that is not the objective of the tests but teacher evaluation is one of the benefits. Think about the implications of objecting to high stake testing on these grounds. What parent wants his child taught by an incompetent teacher? I hear politicians complain bitterly about how bad our public educational system is; the same ones who object to the basic standard established by Common Core, cut education budgets, complain about unions, etc.

True educators are concerned about “teaching to the test”, which is pure nonsense. If I am teaching a subject, I will devote my time teaching that subject the best I can, and the test will show the students learned that subject. If I do my job, the test will be a breeze for the students; it will show which students learned what. How can it be otherwise? Information I learn from testing is information I need to improve my teaching for each student. The problem seems to be that the test results are not available to the teachers in a timely fashion, a fault that administrators can correct. It will reveal to educational administrators how well prepared the students were when they came to my class. The crime in high stakes testing, if there is one, is that the tests are not comprehensive enough to cover all subjects being taught and, therefore, focuses a teacher's attention on a narrow range of subjects; thus, diverts a teacher's attention to those subject that are taught. Of course, to call for a broader range of testing is counter to the current rage against testing.

The last thing I want to mention is the pressure put on our public educational system by private schools. The motivations of private schools are clear; it is either to earn money or to capture the minds of young people for religious or political purposes. Of course, education for profit is wrong no matter how you look at it. I am familiar with church controlled schools and know many of them are not educating children. For example, a child in a Catholic or Evangelical grade school class, who says he or she does not believe in God, Allah, or gives whatever other indication of disbelief fails “religion” regardless of ability to learn reading writing and arithmetic fails the entire school year. In my mind, that is high stakes testing. To ask a child if he or she believes climate change or in evolution, when everything learned outside of school indicates otherwise, is high stake testing. Did you know we have museums in the Plantation South with dinosaurs, and Noah’s arc are in the same time frame?

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