Opting Out of Standardized Tests

In New York, thousands of parents are opting to keep their children out of standardized testing.

I am not entirely sure what the point is. It seems to be mainly a protest movement aimed at shifting the school system away from test preparation toward some other model of education:

The website for the Institute for Collaborative Education, in downtown Manhattan, specifically invites parents of middle-school students to join the opt-out initiative, asking them to demonstrate support for the kind of teaching and learning the school provides, an approach that is antagonistic to rote test preparation.

I have no very strong feelings about this myself. The new wave of standardized tests are not an evil plot, just another attempt to fix a school system that fails to teach millions of students basic knowledge. I often think of this, from an interview with California governor Jerry Brown:

He rattled off a list of decade-by-decade fads and gimmicks for “saving” America’s struggling school system, most recently No Child Left Behind and the “teacher accountability” movement. “The question you have to ask yourself is, if teacher accountability is really the whole key, how can it be that from Comenius”—a 17th-century European pioneer in education—“through John Dewey and Horace Mann, and going back to the Greeks, every­body missed this secret, and we figured it out just now? I’m skeptical of that—and of you, and Washington, and myself.”

Finland often comes up when these questions are debated, and it seems to me that people are confused about what the Finnish example means. Finnish students regularly test as among the best in the world, but Finnish schools are not high-pressure knowledge crammers like those in Japan and Korea. They are much more laid back, with more emphasis on creativity, play, self-direction, all that good liberal stuff. But people holding them up as a model say we know they are good because of the test scores. So if Finnish schools are good, testing in itself can't be the problem; the problem would be a narrow view of what teaching students to do well on the test means.

Honestly I doubt the curriculum really matters all that much. For centuries the Chinese trained their bureaucrats by having them read a set list of old Confucian and Taoist classics, then write about them in a highly structured form called the Eight Legged Essay that nobody ever used for anything but answering exam questions. This was regularly denounced as pointless, and in a sense it was, but on the other hand the Chinese state was probably the best run in the world. Early education in medieval Islam consisted largely of memorizing the Koran, but they led the world in science and mathematics.

I am sure the schools my children attend could be better. But I really doubt there is much the president or the governor can do about it by tweaking the curriculum.