Much has been made lately out of the new end-of-level testing in public schools in the state of Utah. SAGE is a summative test that many legislators believe will identify the low and high performing schools. Legislators want to identify high performing schools to see what they are doing differently, but legislators also want to identify low performing schools so they can be targeted for remediation.
This sounds like a worthy and lofty goal for improving public education in Utah. Unfortunately, summative tests are being misused by legislators who are applying them in ways that they were never intended to be used. Their misuse does not follow what research tells us that summative tests actually do for education, and it also does not follow what summative tests were originally designed to do.
In an article in the Washington Post last year, Valerie Strauss identifies what the science behind summative tests really informs us of. "Kids from the wealthiest families do the best, and the kids from the poorest families do the worst. This pattern applies to virtually every high-stakes standardized test that is given to kids." There is even a non-profit, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, dedicated to ending the kind of misuse of standardized testing that we are now seeing with SAGE in Utah.
One of the best known international standardized assessments, PISA, openly admits that scores vary along socio-economic lines in its report, "How PISA Scores Vary with Socioeconomic Status." Grading schools based on standardized tests does not inform the public anything about a school, other than its socioeconomic status at a given point in time. So grading schools is a wonderful example of a blatant misuse of standardized tests.
These assessments are meant to inform educators, not legislators or other education stakeholders. Assessments are a snapshot in time of a student's performance, not a teacher's performance. Summative tests do not account for the various other variables that affect student learning, many of which are outside of a teacher's control.
Merit pay is another wonderful example of the misuse of summative assessments. Teachers do not become teachers for the paycheck. Most teachers require a spouse to work, or they find it necessary to have a second job on the side in order to survive economically. To believe that there is a financial incentive of a few hundred dollars or even a thousand dollars that can spur teachers to achieve more than they already do with students in the classroom is laughable among those who are familiar with how education works. Teachers are already doing all they can and then some. Merit pay has not worked in other states or countries that have tried it. States that have implemented merit pay have dropped the idea once their mistake became obvious. So, why are some legislators still intent on misusing summative assessments?
Using summative assessments to compare districts, schools, or even teachers is a clear "misuse of standardized testing." The idea of using summative assessments to determine a school's effectiveness undermines a school's credibility and effectiveness within its community. To use summative assessments to determine a teacher's effectiveness undermines that teacher within his or her classroom. It undermines morale, and it is destructive for public education.
Joseph Burke is an English teacher for Weber School District in Ogden. He has been teaching for 15 years in Arizona, California and now Utah.
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