The role of testing in education arouses a political firestorm disproportionate to its actual impact as an educational tool. It inflames passions, and inspires rage; spurs crusaders and critics alike.
Is testing useful? What does it tell us? Advocates and opponents tell different stories. Are tests helpful for informing student achievenement, and therefore driving progress, or are they tools for sorting students into boxes and judging teachers?
To some extent, they’re both, but the biggest problem with testing is how we envision and articulate it. Whenever we talk about testing, we assume the exams are benchmarks of success. We rate ourselves based on them, and our ability — or lack thereof — to succeed on exams allows us and other the ability to quantify our success. Tests are our finish line. Cross the finish line, and you win.
But that’s a poor vision for the role of tests, and one that fails to utilize their strengths or acknowledge their weaknesses. Tests are not the finish line, they are the starting line. And therein lies both the value and the limitations of testing. A true and robust education prepares people to be successful in life in whichever endeavor they pursue. It doesn’t matter what a student’s passion is, they must be able to be creative with it, to push its boundaries, probe its depths, solve its problems.
Put simply, Einstein isn’t famous because he memorized and impeccably recited Newton’s laws.
At the same time, Einstein wouldn’t have found himself in a position to be theorizing relativity without the prior work of Newton and many others. As much as a test cannot truly measure the value or outcome of a good education, it can tell teachers if students are prepared to explore content matter in depth. We want our students having discussions about the implications of dropping the atomic bombs, but if Hiroshima and Nagasaki may as well be Jupiter and Neptune, or if students have no conception of what an atomic weapon is, or the context in which this event happened, such a discussion is impossible.
There is value in testing. If our schools are doing what they should be doing, then test day would be a day to make sure you were present, not a day to stress over, agonize about, prepare for months in advance. Students would already be far outpacing what could be measured by their assessments.
Some may argue that we simply need to make testing more rigorous, as is being proposed and in some places implemented. I agree, testing ought to be rigorous. But it ought not to define outcomes, only inform input. If we accept testing as the starting line, we acknowledge the undeniable truth that all we have done is built on what has been done before, and that having knowledge of that is important. Accordingly, we also realize that the true value of education is ultimatley unmeasurable by any exam, indeed, what we hope our students will do with their education are likely things we cannot yet imagine.
We aren’t yet where we want to be, and rigorous testing can help get us there. Ideally, we reach a place in which tests are given randomly to different schools in different years: accountability check-ins rather than bottom lines. Right now we are lagging, and we can use the tests as ropes to pull us forward. We can expect that baseline level of knowledge, and refuse to accept less than it. We can push relentlessly for that, but more importantly push relentlessly past that. Challenge students to use knowledge so that learning is fun, and tests become not the numerical representation of a student’s success, but a tool to make sure they have the knowledge needed to take take control of their own learning, and a guide to help point them in directions that will excite and stimulate them.
Set a different vision. Embrace the information we can unlock and use to push ourselves by collecting and analyzing data, but acknowledge that any set of numbers never can and never will tell the story of a human being and what they are capable of (if it comes to that, we’re screwed and none of this matters).
That is how we should use testing. That is why we should test.