I have been reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and I found that the part about how education systems become geared towards achieving performance on standardized test, even in the face of the effort’s detriment to actual teaching, very much in keeping with my lived experience.
I was, briefly, a secondary school teacher in the United States. While Mr. Fisher’s experiences are no doubt informed by his living in the UK. I can say that the similarities in our experiences are substantial.
In Texas, where I taught, there was increasing importance put upon standardized tests. These were of course meant to grade the performance of the schools themselves rather than the students. A school with many students who perform well on the tests should, theoretically, be those that teach the curriculum the best. Funding and government overwatch were to be metered out accordingly.
Good in theory, bad in practice.
In reality, the tests became too much of a focus. As school worried incessantly about their ratings they began to really push students for good performance. After all, a well rounded student with a genuine grasp of the subjects taught is supposed to be the goal, but the tests don’t, and can’t, measure that effectively. Just as an example: an algebra teacher tries to instill in their students an understanding of the fundamental processes of algebra and how these processes can be used to solve real world problems. The test makers recognize this and include a number of problems in the math portion of the exam which requires the student to read a scenario and formulate an equation to solve the question in the scenario. Sounds good right? I mean, it tests the skill we are trying to teach.
However, what if the math teacher has successfully taught the students how to interpret scenarios as algebra problems, but the students are poor readers. In the real world, where the information taught would presumably be used, people encounter problems that can be solved by algebra all the time. What they don’t encounter often are said problems written in a paragraph form. People who are poor readers tend to compensate for this with other forms of communication skills. Problems will normally be presented to an adult in some format that is a combination of speech and physical context. The skills the math teacher taught the students will help with this.
But, because the test can’t measure that somewhat ephemeral skill, it can only gauge students’ understanding via the written word, it will appear that the students don’t grasp the material at all.
Now for a school’s overall “grade” it makes sense that the two skills, reading and algebra, must work together. Well rounded students as we said. But the math teacher has no control over the students reading ability. The best strategy for said teacher, therefore, is to focus on teaching students how to answer the test questions, even at the expense of deeper understanding of the material. That is, how to break down the language of the questions to be able to answer them, even without fully grasping the context of the situation described in them.
So much time gets dedicated to practicing for these tests that entire classes are devoted to it. I had students who went to my algebra class, and then would have to spend another hour of the day in a separate class dedicated entirely to passing the state test. Because there are only so many hours in a day, these students would lose an elective for that semester. A shop class, debate, or a musical class would have all been options that they could have chosen from. Instead they spend a class each day just practicing for a test that is actually meant to measure the school’s success, not theirs.
You can probably see where this goes. You end up with students who are missing out on skill electives that could actually be of value to them in their adult lives in order to feed into the bureaucracy of the educational system.
No wonder students so often report being bored. Their time is being wasted on things that can’t possibly matter to them as individuals.
All this to say that standardized testing has hurt our culture significantly over the last few decades.