Reflections on Educational Reform & Assessment

Our country has long been considered a global leader in many fields. However, as evidence mounts that American schools are failing to prepare children for the “real world”, policy makers, most notably our President, have rushed forward to find ways to force schools to do better (Achieve, 2002). The “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001” was created so that all students would have equal access to a “high quality education” that would help them “reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic assessments” (US DOE, 2006). This legislation mandated the implementation of uniform state assessments that could be used to make comparisons between schools and districts. These assessments have, for the most part, been traditional, written objective tests, familiar to every key stakeholder. Schools who can’t meet state standards on these assessments risk losing tax dollars and/or being directly controlled by that state’s department of education. Eager to avoid these penalties, there has been an unfortunate tendency to encourage teachers to “teach to the test,” a practice which has been shown to have deleterious effects on meaningful student learning, especially among younger children (NCREL, 2006). Ironically, it has also been found that “low-achieving students suffer the most from this approach, because if their initial test scores are low, they often are given dull and repetitive skills instruction that does not enable them to grasp underlying concepts” which can actually lower their achievement test scores (NCREL, 2006). Obviously, this is antithetical to the stated objectives of NCLB.

The main purpose of assessment is to discover and document what is being retained by learners during the educational process. Today there is a vast amount of information available to anyone with access to the Internet, yet learners still need to store a certain amount of this information in their long-term memory in order to be quick and efficient in their respective fields. However, today it is often more important to employers that the learner knows how to access, analyze and use information in the workplace. This means that the standard written examination with its multiple-choice, matching and true-false sections needs to be supplemented with more practical, relevant and authentic measures of how well the knowledge “translates” into practice in real-life situations. Since “what gets assessed is what gets taught” (NCREL, 2006), we need to encourage teachers to measure their students’ competencies in the skill areas most needed in today’s workplace through performance-based assessments or other assessment tools like student portfolios. We need to find ways to ensure that teaching methods foster learning that matches the true needs of our society. It is definitely time to rethink the effects of the current “testing climate” on student learning and ask ourselves if we truly are better off than we were before the NCLB act was put into effect.

[References]

Achieve, Inc., Achieve’s Benchmarking Initiative, June 2002 as retrieved on 11/13/06 from http://www.achieve.org/node/329

US Department of Education, as retrieved on 11/9/06 from
http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html

North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL), as retrieved on 11/7/06 from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as700.html