Testing the Fail 0
In a longer article at Psychology Today Blogs–indeed, almost as an aside–Alfie Cohn indicts the reliance on standardized testing and its inimical effects on our school systems. A snippet:
(snip)
But the outrageous and incalculably damaging reality of testing students every single year — extraordinary from a worldwide perspective, in fact virtually unheard of for students below high school age — continues in ESSA (“Elementary and Secondary Education Act”–ed.). Annual testing is something we’ve been conditioned to accept and even to view as tolerable compared to the reality of multiple tests a year, what with benchmark exams in between the other exams, districts piling on with their own assessments, new Common Core tests, and so on.
Remember “cramming” for tests? Two weeks after the test, all the stuff you crammed was gone, whereas, had you studied through the semester/quarter/period, you did not have to cram because you had actually learned stuff.
The regime of standardized tests has institutionalized cramming as a pedagogical technique. The test is all; there is nothing else. Learning is irrelevant to the cram.
Qui bono?
The testing companies. Everyone else is losing.
