Educa t i o n
Pencils Down
the past, present and questionable future of standardized testing in Virginia
Text by Nancy S. Moseley The scene is familiar: rows of students hunched over desks, a completely silent room aside from the beads of sweat dropping off furrowed foreheads and landing as pencil-filled dots on pastel scantron sheets. Of course most testing is now conducted online, but the sweaty foreheads part is likely still on point. Testing in childhood education shows up as early as the mid-1800s, but it wasn’t until 1965’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that the federal government became involved by administering funds to schools in an effort to make education more equitable. Years later, President George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act built on the ESEA by requiring annual testing in reading and math in all 50 states in order to receive that federal funding. The most recent amendment was President Barack Obama’s 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It replaced the faltering NCLB act, whose blanketed 26
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requirements – no consideration for disadvantaged or disabled students were increasingly inapplicable in the classroom. The ESSA gave significantly more control to the states to establish their own academic standards. In Virginia, the Standards of Learning (SOL) testing program was already in full swing. It launched in 1998 in response to declining SAT and 4th grade reading scores. SOL tests covered four content areas: English, math, science and social studies in 3rd, 5th and 8th grades and in high school. “When SOLs were first brought in, I was 100% behind them,” says one retired Montgomery County Public School teacher. The tests were explained as a way to measure basic skills. In other words, “What minimum knowledge we wanted our students to walk away with in a given subject, in a given grade,” he offers. However, as the years of testing championed on, the questions got harder
and harder. Around 2010 the Virginia Department of Education decided to shift test focus from grade-level competency to college and career readiness. “The dynamic of the tests suddenly changed,” states the retired teacher. “And the results were used to punish teachers.” SOL scores became 50% of a teacher’s evaluation, securely linking their salary and job security to how well a typically stressed student could take a standardized test on material above grade-level competency. “It wasn’t about teaching and learning, it was about the pass rate. The state told us what topics we had to cover; there was no room for anything else. It killed creativity,” the teacher says. “’Teaching to the test’ has never been the intention of the State Board of Education,” states Charles Pyle, VDOE’s director of media relations. “This is something the board is aware of and has been concerned about, when instruction becomes overly focused on the blueprint
March/Apri l 2020
