Who's Afraid Of Testing Backlash

 Education Next can be counted on to stand up for the reformy status quo. Let's look at "Testing Backlash Could Hurt American Global Competitiveness," the latest entry in a long line of chicken littling about dropping high stakes testing as the foundation of U.S. education. I read it so you don't have to.

Tanxi Fang is a student at Harvard College concentrating in government, and he has hit all of the standard notes in this golden oldie. 

His way in is a quote from Joe Biden about expanding education into Pre-K and post-secondary areas. But Fang says Biden is skipping over "talk about testing and accountability." Fang points to the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 as having lowered the stakes for testing; it's not that simple, since states are still unwinding their new plans. But, warns Fang, since then "the gains in student achievement that had been seen under the more rigid No Child Left Behind" have leveled off since then. Well, yes--they leveled off almost immediately, right after students were trained in the new test-taking skills requirement. Fang notes that ubiquitous "some" see a link between ESSA and that leveling.

Fang is also concerned that colleges are moving away from standardized test-linked admissions. Ditto for screening for selective schools and programs. Fang adds all this up:

Some experts are voicing concern that a pell-mell move away from testing could hurt America’s standing, especially as America’s global competitors are moving in the opposite direction. China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, have placed standardized exams at the core of their respective education systems, with the high-stakes Gaokao and CBSE exams determining admission into the two countries’ elite universities. Testing is so sought after by students in both countries that American testmakers see them as potential growth markets.

China and India have indeed thrown themselves at testing. It's just not clear that it's doing them any good. Read Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Bog Bad Dragon for a thorough explanation of how China's testing regime is failing them as a country. Reformsters used to hit heavily on the global competitiveness idea, but the problem is that nobody has yet to link test scores to actual global dominance; if there were a link, Estonia would be a major world power. Meanwhile, the secret of China and India still seems to be cheap labor and and lax regulations--not superior test scores. Fang quotes Rick Hess, highlighting his membership in the 2012 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force that concluded that "educational failure puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk." Even if we accept that this is true, it is a galaxy-sized leap from there to "We need more standardized testing."

Fang also talked to Chester Finn, who has also been trying to sound the alarm about "America's achievement problems: and the notion that the world is surpassing us somehow. Finn is afraid that the US is falling behind in competition "with people from all around the world" and that the country's previous economic competitiveness was driven by the fact "that we simply had more education than anyone else, but this is no longer the case." I don't know what his basis for that is; we have hung around the same middling spot on the PISA test since always. Nor am I sure how he's measuring education. And once again, I'm wondering how this whole argument stacks up against the hollowing out of the middle class and the transformation of so many jobs into McJobs which require very little education at all. And--and and and and--what does any of this have to do with the Big Standardized Test? Where is the evidence that taking the BS Test addresses any of these issues?

Next Fang is going to trot out Hanushek, who has been trying to find a link between nations' GDP and test scores, but who has to settle for, "Well, at least the score might motivate specific parents to improve things for their specific child."

Many colleges are ditching the standardized test, Fang says. And he tries to tie in the College Board's decision to ditch the SAT Subject Tests, a failed product that was supposed to compete with the ACT. He notes that the move away from the SAT and ACT is "rooted" in the notion that the tests are unfair, though it might be more on point to say that they're not accurate. He even talks to Robert Schaeffer of FairTest for a quote. And Fang nods to the notion (supported by research) that high school GPAs are better predictors of students' future academic success.

Then Fang runs us through history-- Sputnik, A Nation At Risk, Mark Milley's very close to a Sputnik moment, big trade deficit, India gets most H1-B visas, CIA says Chinese are increasingly adversarial. "Will the U.S. education world adjust to these contemporary developments?

Sigh. We handled the Sputnik moment without standardized testing. Nation at Risk was a position paper, not a research report. And I'm not sure if we can get China to shape up by showing them really good SAT scores. 

The global competitiveness argument remains shot full of holes and unanswered questions. What actually is needed to compete globally, and compete for what, exactly? Military dominance? Economic success--which is measured how? Happiest citizens? Scariest political leaders? And once we've figured all of that out, what is the connection to standardized testing? And that's before we get to the bigger philosophical questions-- if our citizens were happy and healthy and living their best lives, but we were somehow #3 in world rankings (of something--bestness, I guess), would we still have to be sad? Or are concerns about global competitiveness about political leaders keeping us scared so that they can herd us in their preferred direction?