fairtest.org: I guess nostandards.org was taken?

If you’re getting ready to take a standardized test and you’d like to blow off a little steam, you might want to take a look at fairtest.org.  This is a web site maintained by the National Center For Fair & Open Testing, which is a small group of activists on a mission to reform the standardized testing industry.

FairTest has one major thing in common with Grammatix: Both organizations would like to see sweeping changes made to the testing industry.  I commend them for that.  But I have to take issue with their methods, their conclusions, and their proposed alternative to standardized testing.

As you may have read in my manifesto on test-prep, I prefer a market-based approach to the testing problem, while FairTest prefers to agitate.  But our differences extend beyond that.

FairTest believes that standardized tests are racist and sexist because of disparities in the average scores of different groups. In a future blog post, I’ll discuss why such disparities, by themselves, aren’t proof of anything.

FairTest is also against federal and state programs like No Child Left Behind that would use standardized tests to assess educational progress; instead of such programs, they want to leave education entirely in the hands of educators, with no federal or state testing measures.  This position is principled and idealistic; unfortunately, it’s also deeply flawed.  If educators were infallible, it would be fine to let them do their jobs without checking up on them.  Unfortunately, most of today’s educators are not so competent that their work product doesn’t need to be monitored—we routinely graduate students from high school who can’t perform basic mathematical computations or find the verb in a sentence.

I agree with FairTest that there are problems with No Child Left Behind, as well as with state-run standardized testing regimes.  I also agree that the federal government wouldn’t be involved in education in an ideal world.  But the idea that standardized testing of any kind is automatically harmful is absurd.  Every high school graduate should be able to demonstrate basic math and reading ability, and if a standardized test only evaluates these kinds of abilities there’s no reason that passing it can’t be a requirement for graduation.  FairTest’s position on testing would make it possible for students to graduate without ever having to demonstrate that they had achieved even the lowest standards.

Let me be clear—if significant numbers of students are graduating from high school without knowing how to do long division, which is currently the case, the fault is not with the students.  The fault is with the educational system that promotes students without ensuring a basic level of competence.  Such a fault can only be addressed with a standardized testing program.  I’m not claiming that NCLB has no problems, or that the state-based tests have no design flaws.  But the solution is to require that a bare minimum standard be met by all students, not to abolish standards in education altogether.

Instead of using standardized tests like the SAT or ACT, FairTest advocates a slightly fuzzier approach.  FairTest would have students be evaluated by teachers in every subject at every grade level.  These assessments would be considered with other things like GPA and extracurricular achievements.  But there’s a huge problem with that.  Just as the current version of NCLB encourages schools to “teach to the test,” FairTest’s ideal approach would encourage students to kiss up to their teachers in order to get better assessments.  Original thought and debate would be discouraged in favor of regurgitation.

While standardized testing is unquestionably flawed, FairTest misses the boat on what those flaws are.  Measuring students to a standard isn’t a problem; the problem is deciding what that standard should be.