Don't Confuse Testing With Learning

Students in New York City schools are taking so many tests that they have no time to learn anything. Requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Law, coupled with a decision by the city Department of Education to raise the number of diagnostic tests given to third through eighth graders has meant that New York City public school students are taking more standardized tests than ever. Last year, some students took as many as six standardized tests in addition to the other tests that come as a part of their normal curriculum: this year, 10 so-called diagnostic tests have been added in the hope that results on the tests that really matter will improve.

Some students are also being subjected to "field tests", or tests to help a company that devises, tries out and publishes such tests to determine if the tests being worked on will prove a valid tool for evaluating students. Proponents of the field testing concept, many of them educators, say that the field tests are necessary to determine the exact level of difficulty of each question. This is a possibility. However, what this all adds up to is, students in New York City public schools are taking more standardized tests than ever.

Parents at two Manhattan elementary schools who discovered that their children had been selected to participate in such field tests decided to organize a boycott of the tests to be given at their children's schools, declaring that the testing company should figure out another way to conduct its research. One parent quoted in a daily newspaper pointed out that the bombardment of standardized tests to which children at the school are subjected replaces classroom teaching. She called the practice "a waste of everybody's time".

We tend to agree with the parent. While taking tests and measuring oneself is what school is all about, the tests should measure students' progress in understanding material that has been presented. The way this usually happens is, a teacher presents a particular subject, say, Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", the effect of glacier advance and retreat on the local landscape or the economic and religious reasons Columbus sought a new route to Asia and India by sailing west, rather than east. For a specified span of time, three to six weeks usually being respectively the shortest and longest stretches spent on a unit, the students study the material by means of a block of lectures, filmstrips, movies, field trips and whatever else seems appropriate, and then are tested to see how much they learned, sometimes with the aid of pop quizzes along the way or by writing reports and papers. Classroom time is spent learning about the subject, not about test-taking techniques.

Standardized tests most definitely have a place in the American educational process. They are, however, only a part of that process. They do not constitute the whole. Students beset by six to 10 standardized tests in an academic year are not learning anything except how to prepare for such tests. Nowhere in our experience has a course in test-taking techniques occupied an entire nine or 10 months. To devote classroom time merely to learning how to take such tests is a waste of teachers' capabilities and students' comprehension, especially in New York City, where the demand for a skilled labor force will require more than the ability to pick the right response to a multiple-choice question.