On Feb. 22, the Biden administration announced that states must conduct annual standardized tests in the spring after a one-year pause. The U.S. Department of Education has shown some flexibility in granting testing waivers on a state-by-state basis and has given states the option to shorten tests, administer them remotely, and extend testing windows. Nevertheless, the announcement reignited a long-standing debate over the inequities of standardized testing and education in general, much of which has been exacerbated by COVID-19.
My Experience as a Standardized Testing Examiner
After the announcement from the Department of Education in February, the Virginia Department of Education opted to offer optional in-person shortened versions of the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests to students. I had the opportunity to administer SOLs to elementary schoolers in the city of Richmond and, during my brief time as an examiner, I experienced the non-standardization of standardized tests and recognized some of the inequities of our education system.
While some counties in the Richmond metropolitan area resumed in-person learning or adopted a hybrid model of learning at the start of 2021, Richmond City Public Schools (RPS) remained completely virtual. The fact that some students taking the SOL had learned in-person for the past few months while others learned virtually already points to the lack of standardization the results might yield.
The SOL test period would be the first time RPS students saw their classmates and teachers face-to-face in over a year. After the excitement of this long-awaited reunion died down, each SOL examiner was assigned to a classroom with a corresponding school. Due to COVID-19 and the social distancing restrictions in place, we were told that only 15 students were allowed in each classroom for testing. As the only non-certified teacher and the youngest, least-experienced examiner in the room, I was assigned to English Learner (EL) students from a variety of schools.
While other examiners were instructed to send students to overflow classrooms if they reached capacity, I was instructed to keep the 29 EL students in my classroom. Eventually, all examiners received the go-ahead to begin test administration, but only three of my students had computers and headphones.
The extra computers seemed to have been given to the better-funded schools first, and the EL students had to wait until the other students had finished their SOLs to get computers and begin testing. One student in my classroom expressed that she felt it was unfair that they always “got helped last.” The students in my classroom eventually started the test three hours after their English proficient peers, and the school had run out of lunches by the time they finished.
The testing conditions were not identical or standardized between the groups of students present that day, and the learning conditions throughout COVID-19 were far from identical or standardized.
So, why should we rely on these “standardized” tests to assess student achievement and school performance?
Standardized testing aims to objectively measure teaching and learning outcomes by assessing students through similar sets of questions under identical testing conditions. The tests are usually machine-graded and the data collected from students’ scores are used to compare students, teachers, schools, and countries to one another.
Advocates of standardized testing also argue that tests hold schools accountable for their academic performance and are the only objective way to allow policymakers to identify low-performing schools in need of intervention and high-achieving schools deserving rewards.
What are the downsides of standardized testing?
Research has shown that standardized testing does not accurately or objectively measure educational quality. Critics argue that standardized testing more accurately reflects levels of poverty, housing insecurity, and access to healthcare than it does teaching and learning outcomes.
After the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 required states to administer high-stakes standardized tests annually, there has been no significant decrease in test-score inequality between students of racial, linguistic, and economic groups.
High-stakes standardized tests rely on a single test to assess a whole school year of a student’s performance, which leads to increases in testing anxiety and fails to account for individual circumstances that may have affected a student’s learning throughout the year.
Finally, standardized tests narrow the curriculum to subjects on the annual tests. Because teachers are evaluated based on their students’ performances on these tests, they often only cover material that will appear on the annual test, consequently reducing the amount of time for creative and multicultural curricula.
