The Regents’ test fail
The state Board of Regents is considering lowering the threshold for passing standardized tests. This has nothing to do with real education.
By the time a child graduates from preschool — if not sooner — they’ve no doubt learned that they can’t fit a square peg in a round hole. If only years of trial and error, and common sense, could convince New York of the same thing: High-stakes standardized testing, especially in lower grades, isn’t a fit in a modern educational system.
The latest evidence that the state Board of Regents still hasn’t absorbed that lesson came this past week, when a committee recommended that the state should make it easier for students to pass the standardized tests given in math and English in grades three through eight. It was the bureaucratic equivalent of a frustrated toddler trying to force a mismatched peg into the wrong hole.
The scoring committee’s reasoning is that so many children’s learning was so delayed by the COVID -19 pandemic that far too many have been unable to demonstrate proficiency on the tests. Scores in 2022 have been much lower statewide than they were in 2019, and there’s concern that the effects will linger for years.
This is a whole new level of bureau absorbing cratic myopia. It goes beyond the intellectually deficient and pedagogically flawed practice of “teaching to the test” that high-stakes testing engenders. What the Regents propose here might be called “testing to the test” — ensuring that test results reflect as positive a picture of schools and student progress as possible. If an extraordinary event like a pandemic sets back student progress, well then, let’s just change the definition of proficiency!
The whole purpose of education is to help students prepare to be full participants in society. That shouldn’t become secondary to passing tests that fail as meaningful measures of the progress students need to make.
This is not to say that there isn’t a role for tests. Designed locally, they can help teachers measure how well students are their lessons. Standardized tests can help colleges and graduate schools vet and pare down large numbers of applicants. But most teachers and colleges don’t rely solely on a test score to assess progress or eligibility. And they don’t design tests for the sake of ensuring that students pass them. To do so is to render the very notion of proficiency meaningless.
We understand the driving forces here — the desire to measure student progress and the adequacy of their schools while not demoralizing children by failing them on a mass scale.
Yes, student progress suffered across the nation during the pandemic. A recent report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found the learning loss was twice as bad in New York than the national average. That’s a huge challenge that needs to be addressed by educators and lawmakers who are right now looking at how much funding to provide for public education. Mr. DiNapoli, for one, suggested that schools use billions in unspent federal pandemic relief funds to catch students up now, before the deadline to spend it runs out.
The task of helping students make up for those lost years will no doubt be complex and multi-faceted. But to fudge tests that many educators and parents already view skeptically isn’t an answer.