By Domenic Giandomenico, Legislative Director
Many people have recently come out of the woodwork in opposition to the notion that we should actually measure how well our students are learning and hold adults responsible when they are not. Leading the charge are those like Diane Ravitch who, instead of writing about the ways in which testing can be improved, has turned into an anti-testing propagandist and demagogue who lets no fact get in the way of her opinions.
We’re also seeing ridiculous hyperbole by those not seeking sainthood, fervent worshipers, or ever-increasing twitter followers. Joyce Murdock Feilke, an elementary school counselor in Austin, Texas recently called testing “child abuse” in an op-ed published by the Austin American-Statesman. Elsewhere, Feilke associates testing with the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings. Then there’s former middle school teacher Phil Bildner who, in a recent article he wrote for Education Week, slings the “abuse” term at those who support student testing and piles it on by calling testing advocates “bullies.”
What I’d like to know is this: What precisely do you call it when certain members of society turn a blind eye to the indisputable fact that a great many of our students haven’t been imparted the ability to read, write, and do math with any semblance of proficiency? I’d call it “neglect.” And what exactly is it when those aforementioned kids are disproportionately African-American or Hispanic? I’d say it’s “institutionalized racism.”
I guess it’s pretty easy to toss out ad hominems. I can certainly appreciate the cathartic value, but really, where is this all getting us?
I don’t know either Ms. Feilke or Mr. Bildner, but I doubt that they were neglectful of their students or their own children—if either has them. Nor do I believe that they’re racists. However, they are effectively calling every education reform advocate a child abuser and a bully, which really has no place in any legitimate policy debate. (Unfortunately, it seems like a common practice for those supporting the status quo to bash the messenger when they can’t debate on merits.)
What each of these misguided commentators fails to acknowledge is that if all of us reformers walked away, there would still be plenty of testing in education. I seem to remember final exams counting for a rather substantial portion of my grades. Millions of students over the years have either passed or failed their courses because of their performance on one day—to put it in a terminology frequently used by testing opponents. Yet few are advocating the removal of final exams from education.
Leaving aside final exams, students get pop quizzes, interim quizzes, and examinations nearly every day of their academic lives apart from state or federal assessments. Moreover, as a counselor, Feilke—or at the very least those researchers whose work she cites—surely administer tests as part of their assessments of psychological disorders (ADHD, anxiety, depression, mood disorders, conduct disorders) about which, rightly, she so passionately cares about. Are either Ms. Feilke or Mr. Bildner suggesting we should do away with those too?
Put another way, testing is fine for students, but bad when those results can be tracked back to adults. Testing is fine when teachers—not psychometricians and not experts on education standards—create the test. It’s all fun and games when you can’t compare how students perform from one classroom, school, or state to another, but once you can, testing suddenly becomes the equivalent of the most heinous of felonies imaginable. Seems vaguely absurd, doesn’t it?
The issue really isn’t that kids can’t handle testing. It’s that adults can’t handle it.
What Feilke, Bildner, and other anti-testing folks are saying—in no uncertain terms—is that someone assessing whether or not these adults are doing their own jobs as educators and leaders is unacceptable. Worse, they are using these kids as human shields to protect their own inadequacy.
The truth is, we had an education system for quite a long time where we didn’t pay attention to what happened in our schools, and we know how that turned out. It resulted in neglect. It resulted in institutionalized racism. And it resulted in generations of Americans ill-equipped to handle the rigors of life, unable to perform the basic tasks of literacy and numeracy; thus many were condemned to a life of struggle, joblessness or underemployment, and poverty.
So, I ask those with similar views to Feilke and Bildner: Isn’t that abuse, too?
Domenic Giandomenico joined Democrats for Education Reform in 2013 after devoting more than a decade of his career to ensuring that every student of every age, background, and aspiration has access to the excellent education they deserve.