How Standardized Testing is Killing American Education: Reason #5

6th in a series.

5) Testing shapes the curriculum. As schools are evaluated only on their performance on standardized tests, there is a nearly irresistible pressure to abandon any parts of the curriculum that will not be evaluated by those tests. If the material on the tests was representative of the most important areas of knowledge and proficiency, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it isn't.

Let's pretend that a math test has 100 questions, and you can rank them in order of difficulty. Assume that everyone is able to get the 40 easiest questions right, but for the next 60 questions, more and more students get them wrong as they get more difficult. Those first 40 questions didn't tell us anything about which students knew more than the others since everyone got them right. Therefore, those questions could be removed from the test, and the results would be the same.

It's cheaper to make and evaluate tests if we just eliminate those questions that aren't helpful in ranking students and schools. It also cuts down on the time necessary to take the tests, which seems like it would be a good thing for students and schools. There is a drawback to eliminating those questions, however. The questions that most students get right and are not particularly helpful in ranking students tend to be those that focus on the most basic, fundamental, useful, and necessary parts of a discipline, be it algebra, biology, literature or history. What happens, therefore, is that the tests are skewed toward the "fringes" of knowledge; they test the more esoteric, less helpful and necessary parts of a knowledge set more heavily than the basic and more useful parts. Remember when you asked you algebra teacher "when will I ever use this stuff in real life?" Guess what: there's a lot of algebra we use every day... and that's exactly the part that's been eliminated from the test.

What follows is that schools and teachers feel pressured to focus their instruction on areas that they know will be tested, which swings the focus away from the most important parts of the class to the edges. Students find themselves studying advanced topics without a solid grounding in the basics on which they rely, making it necessary for them to rely on algorithms, mnemonics and rote memorization without actual understanding of what the information they're memorizing actually means, why or how it works, and how it can be useful.

So that's reason #5: Students are being taught less basic and useful skills and information, instead being focused on obscure and specialized skill sets removed from the fundamentals of the discipline that give them meaning.

- "This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day, algebra would save our lives."