High Stakes Testing

I've talked a bit about how some of the issues we are covering don't tend to touch me as an art teacher. High stakes standardized testing is one of those issues, and their absence from an arts curriculum is actually a pretty big reason that I pursued art education as opposed to literature or science. I would have a hard time enjoying my work, or teaching in good faith, if my students' success (and my job) was tied to this kind of arbitrary trickle-down wrongheadedness. I'm old enough that standardized testing was not as present in my education as it is now, aside from late high school proficiency tests that were required for graduation. Mostly, I have no experience either as a student or as an educator with their specific effects in the classroom. The standardized testing that I take part in takes the form of portfolio submissions, which I am actually a big fan of. I'll talk more about this later, but these assessments measure learning progress, relate to authentic activities, and are referenced according to local norms.

I do want to make a weird comparison though between the effects of high stakes standardized testing and a trend that was prevalent in art education up until the 1980s-90s and still presents itself in the classrooms of lazy art teachers today: what Efland (1976) defines as the 'school art style.' The school art style is difficult to define, but we have all probably experienced its outcomes: snowmen made of puff balls, decorative fish filled in with predefined patterns, or turkeys made by tracing hands. This is the bad side of 'kid art.' It is bad not so much because of the quality of products produced, but because those products have no relationship either to authentic academic learning or actual works of art. The school art style, according to Efland, has "little or no counterpart either in the personal spontaneous expression of children or in the culture outside of the school" (p. 38). Authentic arts instruction should either offer some sort of academic progress (through multidisciplinary connections) or at least mimic the kinds of activities that 'real' artists do. This might be a stretch, but I want to make a comparison between the school art style and the existence of high stakes standardized testing in that standardized testing has no academic or authentic counterpart. It is entirely context specific (we are familiar with the phrase 'teaching to the test'), and has no relationship either to holistic education nor skill-specificity. All that is to say I think high stakes testing is bizarre, bad, and useless. I have nothing but sympathy for educators whose actual job performance is tied to such garbage. 

My arguments with the existence of these assessments are mostly aesthetical, but standardized testing, as applied to Value Added Models, might not even be valid. As Amrein-Beardsley, Pivovarova, and Geiger (2016) note, "VAMs are open to distortions themselves — such as student sorting, teaching to the test, cheating, and artificial score inflation — just like other methods of evaluating teacher effectiveness that are often deemed less “objective" (p.4). I guess I am curious about whether or not there we can think of any defense for this kind of testing. 

References

Efland, A. (1976). The school art style: A functional analysis. Studies in art education, 17(2), 37-44. 

Amrein-Beardsley, A., Pivovarova, M., & Geiger, T. J. (2016). Value-added models: What the experts say. Phi Delta Kappan, 98(2), 35-40.