Educational Policy

Looking for ‘Standards of Complexity’ in Education

A longtime teacher and curriculum scholar says a renewed emphasis on testing is hurting students — and education.

Kathleen McGarvey

In High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) David Hursh, an associate professor in the Warner School, examines the changing nature of education from several perspectives—autobiographical, historical, political, and philosophical. He discusses the effects of high-stakes testing on American education today.

STANDARDS BEARER: In his new book, Warner School professor David Hursh argues that there are more effective ways to measure student progress than standardized tests.

What’s wrong with putting more emphasis on testing?

The tests don’t cover most of what students learn, and don’t assess in a way that’s very helpful. Instead, for example, we could assess students based on the final product of a project, such as doing oral or pictorial histories of their community, which would be presented to other teachers and parents. We don’t expect enough. I’m not asking for lowering standards, I’m asking for higher standards, and I call them standards of complexity. We should expect more than what’s on the test. However, I’m not against any use of standardized tests, but their use should be limited.

To what extent do you find arguments about the need for tests resonating with the public?

There’s actually a backlash, it seems, against No Child Left Behind, because parents have always been satisfied with their local schools, by and large. If you ask people what do you think about schools in general, they’ll say schools in general aren’t doing very well, but that their own school is good. But increasingly people are saying that the tests are really harming what’s going on in schools.

How would you respond to critics who say that tests are valuable for assessment and accountability?

Tests don’t really keep schools accountable, because tests are a reflection of the average income of families in the school. They’re so closely tied to family income that it’s really hard to know whether a school is doing more or less than it might otherwise without knowing precisely what family backgrounds are.

I agree that we should have more accountability, and I think there are lots of ways to do that. There need to be ways in which schools present information to families and the community about what’s going on, but very little of it should be test scores, because I don’t think that tells us very much at all. We need to be able to present examples of students’ work. You could have community meetings; you could have a group of parents and community members in charge of helping to develop assessments.

I don’t think accountability describes what we’re doing now. We need to be much more democratically responsive to the community.

At the end of the book, you say: “We face a crisis in education different from the one reported in the press.” What’s the real crisis?

The crisis reported in the press is that schools are failing and we need to make them accountable, and [testing] is the way to do it. The real crisis is caused by those changes.

I know people who go into teaching and quit, and people who are thinking about going into teaching, but they say, “I don’t want to go in and just follow a script.” We’re driving out the smartest people in education. We’re bringing in teachers whose only experience is opening a book and following that curriculum.

And I’m worried that we’re driving out the notion that this is a complicated thing that requires considerable discussion and debate. There are no easy answers. We’re not allowing ourselves to have that discussion anymore. We’re letting bureaucrats, or book publishers, decide. But why don’t we talk about what education is?

Why isn’t that something teachers talk about? And that’s the crisis. I’m worried we’re not even going to be able to have those discussions because it’s all been decided by the companies that make the tests.