High-Stakes Testing

Brief Background

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002 is one of the most sweeping federal education laws in American history. Under NCLB, states are mandated to implement a system of HST accountability that includes four main steps. First, states must define curriculum standards in all core subject areas and for every grade level K–12. Second, states must create and implement a statewide, standardized test that gauges students’ progress on prescribed curriculum standards. Third, states must define [Page 375]test score cutoff levels that indicate what level of performance is necessary for passing the test. And fourth, states must prescribe a series of escalating consequences that affect districts/schools should they not meet these predefined standards. HST is at the heart of this entire process.

HST Defined

HST is the practice of attaching significant consequences to students’ standardized test scores. The theory of action undergirding HST is that promising/threatening students and their teachers with potentially lucrative rewards/harsh punishments will compel students to work harder and better. Doing so, it is theorized, will translate into better test scores that will reflect gains in student learning.

Since NCLB was passed, states have adopted a wide variety of rewards and punishments tied to standardized test performance that affect individuals (administrators, teachers, and students) and/or institutions (districts/schools). With regard to individuals, passing a test could yield entry into upper grades for students and significant financial bonuses for administrators and/or teachers. Failing a test could result in the denial of a high school diploma, student retention, and public humiliation for everyone involved with the school. With regard to institutions, if enough students pass the test, then their districts and/or school become eligible for increased funding, and they are likely to receive public praise.

On the other hand, if too many students fail the test, then districts and their schools are susceptible to predefined sanctions. Under NCLB, if too many students fail repeatedly over time, districts/schools receive an escalating set of punishments (public humiliation, loss of funding, and closure).

Effects of HST

There are two lines of research underscoring the impact of HST. In one line of research, the goal is to understand whether HST has increased student learning as measured by tests. Researchers looking at the relationship between HST and students’ reading performance have found that, in general, HST has no association with reading performance and, at times, is related to decreases in reading performance. With regard to math performance, research indicates that HST is inconsistently linked to eighth-grade math performance and slightly positively linked to fourth-grade math. Overall, then, there is little evidence supporting the assumption that HST leads to better performance in reading and math.

In a second line of research, the goal is to understand the unintended effects of HST—those outcomes that were not expected or planned. Much of the research on the unintended effects of HST can be best understood as an artifact of Campbell’s law. Donald Campbell, an eminent social scientist, warned that overreliance on a single indicator for making complex judgments about individuals or institutions will inevitably lead to corruption and distortion. In short, the more value placed on simplistic measures to evaluate complex systems, the more likely it will be that those measures will corrupt and distort the very system being measured. Of course, HST is the exact kind of system that Campbell warned about. Under NCLB, high-stakes tests are treated as the sole indicator of teacher effectiveness and student learning.

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