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Last month I engaged in a school-wide preassessment of sophomores designed to single out those students who needed remediation in order to pass the Texas state TAAS test for graduation. Another period of my day, I administered the actual test to seniors. Half of my teaching time for three days of one week was spent on preparation for and engagement in state testing. In addition, I attended several training sessions before and after school. * The results of the preassessment were less than promising. Of the eight hundred tested, over six hundred sophomores needed reteaching in order to achieve test scores at the level desired by my district. This assessment resulted in skimming minutes off each period of the day to create a new test-preparation period. All core content teachers were assigned to teach directly to the test for an extra period of the day in an effort to raise scores. We received the handout one night before we were required to teach it, and we had five minutes to make it across a quarter mile of hallway to the classroom on the other side of the school where we taught it. Such is teaching in Texas.
These sorts of radical school-wide enrichments have given rise to serious concerns about how standardized testing will affect our children's learning. In the June 2000 issue of Kappan, Linda M. McNeil claims that standardized testing in Texas moves the control of public education from public or professional control toward "business-controlled management accountability systems" (729), but it is not the test that moves this control; it is the response to the test. Though many Texas educators agree with McNeil's view that "test scores generated by centralized testing systems like the TAAS-and by testprep material aimed at producing better scores-are not reliable indicators of learning" (731), TAAS isn't the problem. Neither are the ACT, TASP, MAPS, SAT, or any other test acronym you can think of. The problems with standardized testing lie within the philosophical premises with which educators and students approach test preparation and testing.
Typical responses to standardized testing move away from "differentiated" learning-in a classroom like mine where students learn at their own pace in their own way-toward standardization of all performance through regimented handouts. While a...