STANDARDIZED TESTING

Accurate and appropriate measures are needed to assess educational progress in American schools. We need to know what students are learning and what they are not; we need to be able to diagnose student weaknesses and problems so appropriate prescriptive measures can be taken. The public needs to see evidence that schools are performing their proper function. Public support for public schools is often related directly to the general perception of how well schools are meeting a broad range of educational needs.

Standardized tests can provide useful information for teachers, students, parents, and the public when these tests are an integral part of the instructional program, where the tests are matched to the curriculum, and when these tests are used appropriately for the purposes for which they are intended. Teachers need various types of test information as a guide in determining what students know, and what educational problems students have, and how they can be helped. Comparative student data provide valuable information on how well standards are being met.

Problems do exist with many current testing programs and practices, and changes need to be made so that more accurate and useful information can be derived for educational purposes. Serious problems also exist with the manner in which test scores are sometimes used and misused by public officials, the media and members of the public. Attempts to use test scores to compare individual student performance, without reference to other factors which affect student achievement, are a disser­vice to the public debate on education.

Care must be taken, though, to guard against changes so sweeping as to compromise the very usefulness of the tests we are trying to reform. This danger exists with current "truth-in-testing" legislation.

Therefore, the American Federation of Teachers recommends the following policies on standardized testing.

AFT supports:

• The proper and appropriate use of standardized tests for diagnostic, prescriptive, selection, placement, and program evaluation purposes. Such test information should not be the sole basis for decision-making, but must be analyzed together with a number of other factors.

• Increased study of testing and the wide dissemination of information regarding the proper and appropriate use of standardized tests and the accurate reporting of test results to teachers, students, parents, and the public.

• Increased education of the general public and elected officials as to what constitutes fair use of tests as well as what types of uses are abusive, unfair or illegitimate.

• The concept that public education remains accountable to the public for its actions and that standardized tests are one measure of educational performance.

• The requirement that agencies receiving public funds who offer educational training programs, be mandated to provide the same performance measures as public education.

• The development of standardized tests that are free of cultural and racial bias.

The AFT opposes:

• The elimination of standardized tests based on the inaccurate and irresponsible claims that such tests prevent students from gaining from any subsequent efforts of schools to educate children, as has been charged in recent testing literature.

• The adoption of truth-in-testing legislation which mandates sweeping disclosure of test questions and answers which will destroy the quality and usefulness of such tests. The wholesale disclosure of test questions and answers employed in scoring will make such tests more costly, as well as destroy their quality and usefulness by eliminating secure questions used for insuring comparability over time.

• The kind of misuse of standardized tests by the public or the media which misinterprets the significance of specific test results, or attempts to use the results as a comparative standard between individual teachers or schools, without reference to other means of evaluating student performance and other factors affecting student achievement.