I’m a parent. I grew up in fairly well off communities all around - although my parents were living off grad student salaries until I was 10, we’ve lived in various suburbs and exurbs around Massachusetts, so even at our poorest, I don’t think I could really claim to have lived in anything remotely approximating a poor neighborhood until I lived in downtown Buffalo in grad school. We also currently live in a rich community, and although my kids don’t attend public school here but rather remote public schools, I am stating all this up front to say, my perspective on this issue is almost certainly informed by my privilege and is not necessarily accurate or correct, and I’m writing this not so much as a definitive statement of the value of standardized tests, but merely how it appears from my perspective. And from my perspective, they suck.
Massachusetts implemented the MCAS, our standardized test, for the first time when I was in fourth grade. If I remember correctly, I was part of the very first test year, which tested fourth graders, eight graders, and tenth graders. I am pretty sure this was pre-No Child Left Behind and was Massachusetts opting in, but if I am not mistaken NCLB has now required such tests nationwide. At the time, I remember it being a mild inconvenience, but my teachers did not spend that much time teaching to it and I don’t think anything was actually tied to it at that point, since it was a pilot year. My experience in 8th grade was not wholly dissimilar, but the teachers did spend more of the year teaching to the test, despite the fact I was solidly in a rich community at the time and thus presumably one which should not have had any trouble passing the minimum threshold needed by the state for the student body as a whole. I had about the same experience in 10th grade, except this was also the first year that the MCAS was required for graduating high school, and we also had a pilot test for the Social Studies MCAS I think. I remember some teaching to the test, but overall it felt like only a mild inconvenience.
My oldest child is in 8th grade now. They have to take MCAS now in every subject, every year. This consumes like eight school days which could otherwise have been used for teaching, PLUS a large portion of their class time leading up to the exams is taking up teaching to the test and doing practice exams. Moreover, unlike me, who has never had test taking anxiety, my oldest child gets very stressed out by exams, and so has been in a constant freaked out state for weeks. My younger kid luckily only has to devote four class days to MCAS, and it does not seem they spent any time specifically teaching to it, but still. This feels like an absurd amount of time to devote to something, especially in these younger grades where there is no stakes for the student. It doesn’t matter whether they do well or not. Its just a tool for evaluating the schools until high school.
I understand the need to evaluate schools. It is important to know if they are doing well. My understanding is, however, that they lose funding if they don’t do well enough, which seems nonsense to me. How can they possibly improve of they lose funding for doing poorly? Failing should trigger additional oversight AND additional funding, not cut funding. And devoting basically two whole school week of class days to test taking that doesn’t even matter to students seems wasteful and unnecessarily cruel to those students. Can this really be the best possible solution for this? In the twenty years since I graduated high school it really feels to me like standardized tests have spiralled out of control.
I mean honestly the fact that my kid has noticed certain teachers openly using AI to write lesson plans is worse, tho, so maybe this isn’t the biggest issue for schools at the moment. Still, I hate that my kid has to go through this stress hell every year, just so poor kids in other schools can be denied funding in hopes the threat of defunding will somehow incentivize kids to do better for the sake of their school that is failing them.
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