Long term impact of standardized testing on education!

The verdict is in on education reform, The Ottawa Citizen, Thu 30 Apr 2009, Elizabeth

This crop of Ontario students may be the most tested in history, yet some only graduate with the help of a giant safety net that rescues them from failure even if they cheat, plagiarize, fail to show up for tests and don't hand in assignments.

The policies, being dubbed "Johnny can't fail," were aimed at raising high-school graduation rates. And they have outraged the province's high-school teachers, many of whom have spoken out in recent weeks to say the system is broken. Meanwhile, university professors have added to the concern about Ontario high-school graduates, saying they are seeing growing numbers of students who are immature, have weak research skills, are unable to work independently, and have highly developed senses of entitlement.

Weren't the back-to-basics education reforms of the 1990s supposed to fix all this?

That's certainly what we were told when Mike Harris's Common Sense Revolution rolled in with changes that included a much-heralded return to standardized testing and more accountability in education.

To be fair, the education reform movement was not a Tory invention; it was embraced by parties of all political stripes in Ontario and across North America. Although big changes came into effect under the Ontario Conservatives, most of them were recommended by the province's Royal Commission on Learning, appointed by Bob Rae's NDP government. And the current provincial Liberal government has maintained and supported many of the reforms it inherited.

The issues faced by some high school students and recent graduates are telling. The students at the centre of the storm are among the first to have fully experienced education reform -- they have been
tested throughout most of their school careers. Are "Johnny can't fail" and Generation Google products of these "fixes" to the school system?

Given mounting evidence, it is worth asking what happened to the tougher standards the system was supposed to produce and whether the simplistic ideas that typified the education reform movement have done more harm than good to a generation of students.

Alfie Kohn, a vocal education critic and U.S.-based author of The Case Against Standardized Testing and The Schools Our Children Deserve, has many theories about how so-called "rigorous" standards and standardized testing can be hazardous to children's education.

He has been warning audiences in Canada and the U.S. for years about the negative consequences of the education reform movement.

"The dirty little secret of education reform is that standardized exams, like those imposed on Ontario students, tend to measure what matters least," he said in an e-mail interview.

As a result, he said, it is possible to raise students' test scores, yet lower the quality of their learning. "Conversely, some teachers do wonderful lessons that help kids think deeply and get excited about ideas, but those students' test scores don't go up and may even go down."

In other words, in Kohn's view, we have a system that rewards shallow thinking and fails to reward more creative, in-depth learning.

Kohn has called standardized testing "inherently destructive to learning" and has said it squeezes the "intellectual life out of our schools."

On first blush, his criticism may seem overzealous. After all, students are tested just four times during 13 or 14 years of school.
But the tests are just part of the problem, he says. "They're just the enforcement mechanism for a top-down, one-size-fits-all, corporate-style accountability fad that has had schools in its grip under both the Tories and the Liberals (in Ontario) ... a narrow focus on rigour and tougher standards is part of the problem. It reflects a mindless, macho sensibility more commonly found among politicians than among educators in the classroom."

Kohn says the "tougher standards movement" gets a number of things wrong, including, critically, what motivates students. A focus on how well one is doing is very different from a focus on what one is doing, he notes. "A preoccupation with performance often undermines interest in learning, quality of learning and a desire to be challenged."

Kohn also believes the emphasis on testing, and teaching for the test, results in sacrifices in other areas. He says accountability, and mandating a particular type of education and outcomes, has a strangling effect on learning.

It is also worth noting EQAO tests in grades 3, 6 and 9, and the high-school literacy tests, are prepared for, taken and then forgotten. Students get no opportunity to learn from the experiences by discussing their results.

The latest issue to bedevil Ontario's school system -- the "Johnny can't fail" syndrome -- results from the same mindset he believes marked the education reform movement all along, a focus on performance, rather than learning. Raising the graduation rate in Ontario is meaningless if the bar has to be lowered to get some of those graduates through.

From this perspective, education reform looks like a failed experiment. This generation of students deserves an explanation.

Elizabeth Payne is a member of the Citizen's editorial board.