None of the Above
It is no secret to anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the past six years that public education has undergone a literal revolution. A wave of standards-based reforms in elementary and secondary education has swept the country, with many promising state initiatives and with strong leadership and support from the federal government. A central component of many of the state-based reforms has been the institution (or the planned development) of a series of high-stakes tests for students—by definition, designed to measure learning either as a condition of grade-to-grade promotion or as a condition of high school graduation.
One particularly striking feature of the public-policy discussion about educational reforms contemplated or under way is the frequently singular emphasis on students' scores on these high-stakes tests. Often, as if mere testing holds the answers to all of the problems that plague our schools, this focus on the testing programs or student test scores has not been accompanied by commensurate attention to related accountability issues, such as teacher professional development, or ways to ensure that schools receive the necessary resources to meet the needs of a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse student population. In short, all too often, tests have come to be viewed as the ultimate cure-all, rather than the benchmark to help gauge the performance of students and raise questions about what additional steps should be taken to improve their classroom learning and school experience.
Very recently, headlines advising of the "backlash" against standards reforms have surfaced, consistently linked to concerns about the high-stakes-testing practices associated with the standards movement. Some educators, analysts, and advocates have concluded that high-stakes-testing practices can only perpetuate the discrimination that, at times and in certain places, has plagued our public schools, thus doing more harm than good to the very students who need the most help. Some have gone so far as to conclude that the testing practices associated with standards reform are "dangerous." And stories like the one where high school students in one school deliberately flunked a state exam in protest of the "testing frenzy" or, in another, refused to take state-mandated tests at all, have served to highlight the concerns of some about the use of tests for individual student accountability—questioning the very notion that large-scale tests are appropriate measures of student learning for any...
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