Why do teachers hate testing so much?

Their outsized attention on a fairly customary and traditional part of schooling is just weird to me

As a kid I hated the people of Iowa even though I had never been there. Why? Because I hated the Iowa basic skills test that they put before me each year.

I didn’t like testing then, and I don’t like it now. But, fighting that part of schooling seemed about as useful as fighting using pencils, sitting in chairs, reviewing textbooks, doing homework, taking pop quizzes, reading boring dead authors, being told when I could and couldn’t use the restroom, and listening to long, dry, and seeming useless lectures - all things I hated.

Now that it’s spring again, I don’t think anyone will be challenging all of those eternally bad things about public education, but there will be an uptick of stories about the badness of standardized tests (such as this one).

For the past decade, the anti-testing religious sect has grown crazed and focused.

A March 2022 story on the socialist webzine Jacobin shows the extent to which testing has for them become a grossly politicized and contentious part of educating children.

For decades, education reformers have proposed academic performance, measured by standardized testing, as the solution to inequality. It doesn’t work, and it’s losing Democrats votes. But most important, it’s costing kids the opportunity to learn through play.

Yikes.

In my mind, education trade unionists like the Jacobins and their cousins in sister publications poison discussions about pedagogical practices by forcing them into the worker-management paradigm and turning them into a factory dispute. Educators owe the public a drama-free, level-headed discussion about the longstanding purpose of student testing. That can’t happen if they’re hyperventilating about the topic and recycling misleading talking points that sound more like an aversion to accountability than an honest attempt to create public understanding.

My kids are taking state tests for reading one day this week and math one day next week. They are fine with it. As parents, we’re fine with it too. The past two years have been awash in worry about their progress with very little objective information to know how they’re doing. We’re anticipating the results not as an end-all-be-all, but as a summative baseline.

While no one in our orbit seems troubled by this customary part of the educational process, and, yet, the Twitters are fluttering as always with educator stories that would have you believe testing students is like the diabetes of education. They say the tests are racially biased, take up a lot of valuable time, don’t tell us much about what our students learn, and are correlated with poverty.

In truth, the tests our students take are constantly adjusted for racial sensitivity, the time they take is a mere few hours each year, the results illustrate for district and state leaders how aligned their curriculum and teaching are with state standards of what all kids should know, and the poverty correlation doesn’t mean all poor kids do poorly regardless of their school.

And, while anti-testers will trot out every bit of research about things like stereotype threat in testing, they leave a body of research on the table about the positive effects of testing on learning.

There must be other reasons I’m missing that explains why teachers spend so much of their commentary on denouncing tests as if they’re among the biggest problem in education. I personally think it’s because they don’t like the outcomes that tests reveal. They take it personally and feel the public blames them. Instead of working to improve the outcomes, it’s easier to cast suspicion on the tools used to determine if students are learning what state standards say they should.

To be fair, some educationists do more than lament testing. Some of them are thinking about new and novel ways to measure school quality and performance that aren’t solely reliant on test scores. That’s promising. I await their findings and hope they produce a way for us to measure standards-based proficiency - especially in reading and math.

Until then, we need the tests as they are.

What I would ask you do to is take a look at a sample of the 7th-grade reading tests one of my kids will take and tell me if it looks as bad as test haters say it is.

You can see it here. Let me know what you think.