Critical Reaction

When I began the teaching year, I had a provisional understanding of standardized tests and the role they play in our students’ lives. I knew the pressure placed on students, teachers, and administrators to achieve high test scores, and I knew that such pressure came in large part from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Knowing this, I thought that the heavy stress placed on high-stakes, mandated testing would be something that I, with my desire to teach critical literacy, could work under. I believed that I could prepare my students for success on the English Regents exam as part of a rigorous curriculum focused on critical thinking, reading, and writing. I hoped that students would come to understand the exam scenario as the rehearsal of a series of maneuvers that bespeaks a complex, foundational critical literacy. I hoped, too, that the other demonstrations of knowledge the students undertook (portfolio presentations, for example) would be integrated with the Regents exam as part of a well-rounded assessment approach that reflected an equally well-rounded curriculum and learning experience.

My fumblings and failings as a first-year teacher aside, my thoughts, beliefs, and hopes for a successful critical literacy curriculum were thwarted by the realities of teaching to the tests. The tension between, on the one hand, high-stakes mandated testing and, on the other hand, more authentic performance-based demonstrations of knowledge is not merely one between differing but equally useful modes of assessment; rather, the tension is one between educational cultures the beliefs, values, and obligations of which are so different as to appear at war. Perhaps that’s a hyperbolic and reactionary diagnosis, but after a year of teaching in the South Bronx, I do believe that the educational culture promoted by NCLB and high-stakes testing is one at odds with the more generative, rigorous, and ethical educational culture developed by critical literacy.

So the hot-topic question for me becomes: How do we find a place for authentic critical thinking, reading, and writing in the educational culture created by the current iteration of NCLB, especially its promotion of and reliance on high-stakes mandated testing? Proponents of such testing argue that standardized tests are effective measures of essential student skills. Janet McClaskey (2001), who calls for a re-evaluation of strong negative responses to standardized testing, writes that tests "evaluate such skills as the student’s use of contextual analysis to determine a word’s definition, a real-life skill that is needed in any occupation. Since standardized tests evaluate skills instead of content, they offer an evaluation of students’ ability to think their way through a new situation, an important diagnostic tool for students as well as for colleges or employers” (McClaskey, 2001, p.90). This is indeed true, and McClaskey’s point regarding the need to equip students with college and career- relevant skills is well taken. In conversations with colleagues who support the exams, they also argue for standardized tests’ ability to measure student skills of, among other things, contextualizing and defining words and for the tests’ encouragement of a backwards-planned curriculum that emphasizes such skills. Personally, I think these skills are crucial components of the well-rounded skill set and content knowledge a graduating high-school senior should be able to demonstrate.

My concern is that the educational culture has evolved in a way that situates standardized testing as its constitutive element. At my school, where students only take English Regents exams and otherwise present content-specific portfolios, we spend so much time fighting to keep our Regents waivers that we are left with no time to develop the curriculum those waivers are meant to allow. Students can fail two terms’ worth of English and still graduate with a passing score on the Regents exam. Most damagingly, students understand the pressure they are under to pass the exam, and so they begin to see their education not as a transformative experience whereby they become more invested and active participants in their communities, but rather as a hoop-jumping exercise that gets them their “paper.”

Consequently, Julia Barrier-Ferreira (2008) contends that students start to see themselves as they are seen by teachers and administrators: as commodities. Carlo Ricci (2004) argues that standardized testing compromises a student’s ability to participate in democracy in the form of a critical engagement with its suppositions and actions. Consider the language of McClaskey’s (2001) defense of standardized testing: students learn skills necessary to their occupations and careers. Nowhere in the argument for standardized testing do we find a claim that students come away better equipped to critically interrogate their experiences, their place in the world, their position as historically and politically constructed beings.

Critical literacy supposes that language is where we come from and what we are and that the broadest categories used to frame human experience and relations (including the historical and the political) are linguistic categories first. To argue that we are linguistic beings is thus to presuppose that asking questions of discourse, of language, and of literacy is always already a consideration of how we are made up as individuals and communities and how we are located within specific power relations (Shor 1999). While standardized tests can measure a student’s strength in defining words and placing them in context or in mastering the moves of a compare/contrast literary analysis, or even in the ability to distill a written argument down to its essential claims, standardized tests fall far short in assessing how a student has learned to analyze a text or a system for its slippages, its contradictions, its ambiguities, and its position in relation to discourses of power. They do not assess how students reflect on what they are learning and why. Finally, standardized testing does nothing to promote the understanding that the aim of an education is to develop the curiosity and skills requisite to envisioning change and acting to achieve it.

References

Barrier-Ferreira, J (2008). “Producing commodities or educating children? Nurturing the
personal growth of students in the face of standardized testing.” Clearing House:
A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues, and Ideas, 81(3), 138-140.
McClaskey, J (2001). “Who’s afraid of the big, bad TAAS? Rethinking our response to
standardized testing.” The English Journal, 91(1), 88-96.
Ricci, C (2004). “The case against standardizes testing and the call for the revitalization of
democracy.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 26, 339-
361.
Shor, I (1999). “Introduction: What is critical literacy?” In I. Shor & C. Pari (Eds.),
Critical Literacy in Action (pp. 3-28). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.