Rapid City native Carol Hayse spent her career as a school social worker in the Chicago Public Schools until last summer, when she retired and moved back to the Black Hills. She’s at the National Association of Social Workers South Dakota conference in Sioux Falls, where yesterday she offered her fellow professionals a presentation titled, “Test Anxiety and the Common Core State Standards: How Worried Should We Be?”
Hayse notes that 33% of students experience some form of test anxiety and that No Child Left Behind tests provoked higher test anxiety. Hayse lists the many ways we can help students deal with test anxiety, but she says the simplest way to deal with test anxiety is to get rid of high-stakes standardized tests.
Hayse lists numerous detriments of all the standardized testing now pushed under the Common Core brand but focuses on the following as the most essential problems:
- They are designed to sort/rank schools into “winners” and “losers”
- They are a primary weapon to privatize public education, cf. school choice [are you listening, Senator Heineman?]
- They obscure the fact that the main problem with test scores is POVERTY
- Public policy is then directed away from providing social supports for struggling families
Hayse lumps Common Core testing in with the push for vouchers and charter schools as an effort to undermine public education. Hayse urges parents to opt their kids out of standardized tests.
Interestingly, Hayse concludes her presentation with this p.s. about the University of Chicago Lab School, an expensive but unionized private school:
The children of Arne Duncan and Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emmanuel go to a school with 1200 students called The Lab School. They have multiple music, art, and library teachers. They take no standardized tests except the SAT [Carol Hayse, presentation, NASW-SD annual conference, Sioux Falls, SD, 2016.03.17].
On the standardized testing score, the Lab School appears to get it right: offer a rich curriculum, and leave the standardized testing to someone else.
We home school, and we do test the kids annually using a standardized tests. This is not done so much as a measure of their intelligence though. We reason that they will encounter standardized tests at some point in life (ACT, SATs, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, et cetera..), and they need to learn the skill set of taking a standardized test. It also, in part, shapes the future curriculum we use, as it gives us a good idea of what the “educational world” thinks a child should know.
I would be curious to hear from any public school teachers on morality, and how they teach that. According to the South Dakota Constitution:
If the standardized tests measure for intelligence (or the how much of what taught sticks), what do you use to measure the morality, and if you are shape children into both moral and intelligent people?
It has been a little over twenty years since I have taken a standardized test. I was asked to come to the local middle school a few years back to talk with some teachers. One of the teachers was doing a presentation and put a multiple choice question on the board. I don’t remember the question, but in about a minute I figured out the answer because of how the answers were written: sometimes, always, all of the above, etc. It showed me how I had been taught to take a test.
As a newly retired teacher of 38 years, I have seen the unjust nor’easter of testing and prepping for tests at the great expense to authentic, constructivist learning for all students. Education has become more and more a business and its students profits for the testing and publishing companies who benefit from Common Core and the proliferation of tests. I urge parents, families and students to push back, raise questions and opt-out of tests that take away from students gaining important literacy-building and critical thinking skills.
Joseph, see also the state’s legal requirement for character development instruction:
I’ve never seen a bubble test on those topics. Like you, I teach morality by example.
Now let me see if I got this right: you teach your kids how to take standardized tests because in the future they will have to take standardized tests. I suppose that’s as sensible as teaching personal finance and bicycle repair… but doesn’t that mean the tests really exist for their own sake rather than for any benefit in assessing their learning in homeschool?
MTR, I know those tricks! I’ll admit, teaching kids how to analyze and out-think a test could be as good for their critical thinking skills as teaching them the content they need to pass the test straightforwardly.
But however much critical thinking we could teach to out-think tests, I’m with Linda—we can find much better ways to teach critical thinking, as well as much more authentic assessments in which students actually create something of value and demonstrate the full range of their knowledge and skills, beyond just responding to standardized questions.
Cory,
We assess the learning in homeschooling on a daily basis. Since we have a lot of control and oversight, we can assess when one child is struggling in an area almost immediately (such as taking longer than usual to do an assignment, the performance on a daily quiz (oral and written), et cetera.) This is one of the great strengths of homeschooling, being able to fine-tune education to maximize educational potential (such as switching to a different text book, or doing subjects in various orders through out the day). Taking a standardized test can confirm things for us, but it is a reality that if our children want to pursue advanced education, they will have to take standardized tests. Besides, the last few years that our children have taken standardized tests, they have scored high in their grade level (there was one year when one of the kids did not know a lot about geometric solids….because we were covering it math the week after we did the testing).
We have a test taking culture, and our kids will likely need to know the skill set, just like they will have to know how to use a computer or drive a car. As an assessment on learning? Meh, I will leave that to the public schools to help with their factory schooling.
Low bureaucracy, high test scores, 4:1 student teacher ratio, per pupil annual educational spending of less than $300, and saving the public school (and tax payer) money…all while producing intelligent and moral citizens. What’s not to like?
Joseph, your educational model is my ideal. I wish I could deliver that kind of attention and customization every day in the classroom. You know where your kids stand every day, no standardized test necessary.
But on your per-pupil spending estimate, does that include labor?