Standardized tests are good

We should listen to what the results are telling us

Becky Pringle, the President of the National Education Association, tweeted yesterday that, “Our current standardized testing system is inaccurate, inequitable, and just plain broken.”

It’s not clear what made Pringle want to comment on standardized tests yesterday, but she’s wrong on the merits.

The research suggests that standardized test scores are strong predictors of a student's future achievement, course-taking, and high school graduation. That’s even more true for younger students, when we have less information, than it is for older students, who have built up a long track record of credits and grades. But even for high school students achievement scores matter a great deal.

My favorite study on this question is work by Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly. They investigated how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting later high school outcomes using data from three states, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State. Here’s their conclusion (emphasis added):

A large literature shows that early academic performance, measured primarily by test scores, is predictive of later academic success, and that there are significant gaps in student achievement by student disadvantaged status. Our findings reaffirm these findings. Indeed, across three states we find consistent and very strong relationships between 3rd grade test scores and high school tests, advanced course-taking, and graduation. For instance, all else equal, a student at the lowest percentile of the 3rd grade math test distribution rather than the highest percentile is expected to be 48-54 (depending on state) percentile points lower in the high school math test distribution, is expected to be 45 to 50 percent less likely to take an advance course in high school, and 11 to 21 percent less likely to graduate. We conclude that early student struggles on state tests are a credible warning signal for schools and systems that make the case for additional academic support in the near term, as opposed to assuming that additional years of instruction are likely to change a student’s trajectory. Educators and families should take 3rd grade test results seriously and respond accordingly; while they may not be determinative, they provide a strong indication of the path a student is on.

State tests are not perfect. For example, my personal hobbyhorse is that states are too slow to release the results, which in turn makes them less usable by parents and educators.

But standardized tests are quite good at what they do. The results are honest, accurate, and comparable, and they add additional information beyond other potential ways of identifying students who might need more academic support. State tests also tend to be more fair and equitable than other potential measures of student performance.

So rather than trying to tear down the tests themselves, adults—parents, teachers, union leaders, policymakers—should pay attention to the results. Our students deserve adults who respond to what the tests are telling us.