Have we gone too far with assesment?

For as long as I have been trying to become a teacher I have heard about the problem of standardization and testing.  Intended to make sure that every student that graduates with a repertoire of knowledge, it became a problematic set of standards that crushed critical thinking and creativity. But still teachers had limited power within their own classrooms to find new ways to instruct their students that fit the standards but still encouraged critical thinking.

Until I went to Shurz for the first time this week I thought that kind of classroom I would have when I got to teaching. But when I met Ms. Wrenn for the first time and she showed me what she would be teaching her students that day, I saw a new and slightly worrying level of assesment.

At Shurz the teachers operate under a benchmark system. Each teacher is required to teach a certain set of skills or concepts (skills based ELA) which is assessed through 5 quizes/exams for each benchmark. In order to have been said to have passed the bench mark a student must pass 3 out of the 5.

At first this didn't seem that different from the other schools that I had observed before but it was when Ms. Wrenn explained how they received grades that I began to worry. You see the only grades that the students receive is based on the results of the benchmark quizzes and the final exam taken at the end of the semester. Teachers are free to assign daily work, and papers and the like but their scores are not weighted and so are not worth any points to their final grade.

And so we see the logical conclusion to our perpetual insistence on standardized testing as the only true way of measuring student performance, students are taught that the only important information is what is going to be on the test, and that they only need to keep that knowledge long enough to regurgitate it on a page.

This is direct contradiction to what we have been talking about in class and what I have read in Smagorinski and Beach. Consistently we spoke about the power of differentiated assessment, and finding a way to test our students without testing them. Smagorinski shows how the constructivist way of teaching can be used to make learning a process in which the teacher and student interact while learning. Beach goes a more explicit route and insists to his readers that fulfilling the "common core" standards need not be two dimensional and inorganic.

With all of these alternatives to testing our students until they do well enough on the test that we can ignore them, it is hard to think that standardized testing is the best way to asses our students' knowledge. Let's see what else we can do eh?