Breaking the Testing Code: What You Need to Know About Standardized Testing

Breaking the Testing Code Exactly what are Standardized Achievement Tests and what is their purpose and their proper usage? Breaking the Testing Code simply means cutting through the verbiage being delivered to us from test makers and standards setters. It is telling what this type of testing is and how it is being overused and misused in our schools – with our kids. It is also a call to return standardized achievement testing to its former place in our school program – where it has been a useful tool for curriculum development and instructional improvement. There is Achievement Testing and then there is Standardized Achievement Testing The tried and true teaching/learning process – Teach - Test - Assess - Analyze - Remediate – is now being twisted so that the Test element has become the goal. What the student learns has become less important than his score on the standardized achievement test. Everyone involved in making those decisions that are so critical in the lives of our children has the responsibility to learn the basic concepts, facts, and procedures of testing – policy makers, teachers, administrators, and parents. The goal for teachers working with their children has always been for them to learn, to become educated. In our new world, the goal has changed. The focus is on the test - not on the children learning. The children, with their teachers, are now simply becoming workers whose job is to create better test scores. This must be changed.

Peter S. Pierro is a retired professor of education. He began his teaching career in a one-room school house in the middle of the cornfields of northern Illinois. His public school teaching experiences were in grades 4-6, junior high math, and he served as Curriculum Director and Testing Supervisor in a K-12 school district. He taught educational psychology courses including Tests and Measurement at Elmhurst College in Illinois, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Langston University, and the University of Oklahoma.