How Testing Became King

 

“What a funny little government” An 1899 cartoon to illustrate the wealth and power that JD Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had achieved and how this could be used to drive policy. 

I began my teaching career in 2001, which was the beginning of No Child Left Behind, a distinct turning point in US education policy. Prior to becoming a teacher, I didn’t really think much about standardized tests. I remember taking them once in middle school and again in high school, but they weren’t that important. NCLB changed that though, and my entire teaching career has been in the era where test scores alone define students, teachers, and schools. Since we’ve only been in this place for 20 years, a good question to ask is how did tests become so important and what does this mean? 

NCLB was passed in 2001, and it marks the biggest federal intervention in education in our nation’s history. The purpose of NCLB was to improve the quality of education for all students in all schools throughout the nation by establishing accountability measures that had to be met. Historically, schools have been much more the province of the state than the federal government, but under NCLB, schools and states only get the federal part of their budget if they agree to the provisions of the law. Like any major law, there were many provisions, but here are the big two: states had to create common standards for their schools and they had to agree to a regimen of testing in order to see if these standards are being met.

The lynchpin of NCLB were the tests that were now required. There are a lot of schools and districts in the US, and being property of the various different states, there are a lot of different systems here with different methods and curriculum. Something was needed that could be applied to all these various systems, and testing made the most sense. Most schools were already giving standard exams here and there to all their students, and because of this, it’s the one thing they all had in common. Also, if the same test is given to all students throughout a state, different schools would have different scores, so it works as a convenient tool to judge schools’ efficacy. Tests produce measurable, understandable data and goals can easily be set based on that data. 

It didn’t take very long before every state in our nation created the standards NCLB required and began testing and measuring their students and schools. These tests themselves are created by a myriad of companies, but actually 4 corporations and their many subsidiaries administer the majority of the tests throughout the US: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. Like many big corporations, most of these companies are conglomerations of companies, but you may recognize these names. If you do, it’s because these companies are also the major textbook publishers in the US. Not only do many of these testing corporations make, provide and score standardized assessments, they make the books that cover the standards and provide the resources used to help students pass.

Testing is big business in the US, and it’s being run by companies that have done business with school districts for years. There are over 50 million students to be tested in the US, and taken together, the states spend billions on tests annually. All of these companies lobby aggressively and have large marketing budgets counted in the millions. In 2016, the College Board (Makers of SAT, PSAT and AP exams, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin) spent $2.5 million in lobbying, mostly at the state level, and that’s just one example. The Big Four and other test companies have flourished since the passage of NCLB, and when this act was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, not very surprisingly, the lynchpin of the new act is standardized testing. In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned of the rising Military Industrial Complex and how this could drive policy. Looking at the numbers, it seems like we also have a Testing Industrial Complex and it too drives policy.

So that’s how testing became king. Standardized tests became required by law throughout the US in 2001, and a sizable industry grew around it that aggressively markets their products because livelihoods depend on it. Maybe this is the way of the world, but I think there are two things that both educators and education policy makers should consider here: 

First, tests are not being used to measure students, they are being used to measure schools. We chose them in 2001 because they offer the easiest way to differentiate schools, not because they matter for students.We’ve had standardized tests being given to students since about 1900, but they were only marginally important until 2001. Colleges can’t use state tests like the ISAT for entrance, because states use different tests. Also, college admittance counselors look at test scores, cumulative high school GPA, and other factors to determine entrance. Almost all say that GPA matters much more than test scores. Post high school employers? What employers know or care what kids' test scores are? In other words, today, kids’ test scores are A LOT more important to schools and state education departments than to the kids who earn them. How students score on tests -good or bad- will affect them very little. 

Second, tests are a marketed, lobbied product. This is a lucrative industry that pays a lot of folks to help us think that tests are important. Remember this industry makes billions each year and spends millions in lobbying and marketing. In education today, it’s almost a given that policymakers believe that a school’s test scores define students and schools, and test makers aren’t afraid to spend money in places where testing decisions are being made to keep it that way. The idea that test scores define students or schools doesn’t represent reality, it represents a triumph of marketing.

I think that we will probably always use some form of standardized testing. I’m sure that all the various tests we use are probably pretty good products even if some big companies are spending big bucks to keep tests king. At the same time though, I take the reader down this little historical walk because I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t God that made tests all important, it was the combination of wanting an easy way to measure schools and the desire of the textbook industry to increase its profits. We devote exponentially more time to testing kids in school today than we did 20 years ago despite the fact that how kids do on tests often has little correlation with the grades they earn or how they will do in life. Is it sacrilege to say that it might not be a bad idea to use more measures than just test scores to judge the efficacy of schools?