Assessment, Student Confidence, and School Success

Mr. Stiggins questions the notion that intimidation by assessment will lead to more effective schools, and he offers an alternative vision in which we use assessment to build student confidence in the service of school improvement. THE TIME has come to fundamentally rethink the relationship between assessment and effective schooling. This reevaluation must center not on how we assess student achievement but on how we use assessment in pursuit of student success. We have a long tradition of striving to weave assessment into our school improvement equations. These efforts have focused almost totally on the use of standardized tests to enhance the effectiveness of schools. I believe that those efforts have been shortsighted because they have been founded on a set of naive assumptions about the relationship between assessment and student and teacher motivation. Students succeed academically only if they want to succeed and feel capable of doing so. If they lack either desire or confidence, they will not be successful. Therefore, the essential question is a dual one: How do we help our students want to learn and feel capable of learning? Historically, we have built our answer to this question on several assumptions. We assume that we can stimulate maximum teacher effort and student learning by threatening public embarrassment for both students and teachers if students don't succeed academically. We assume that the reason students do not learn is that teachers and students are not putting forth the effort required to succeed. Thus the key to success is to find ways to compel students and teachers to work harder. And the conventional wisdom has been that the way to spur greater effort is through intimidation by means of the threat of dire consequences for low test scores. In this article, I question the notion that intimidation by assessment will lead to more effective schools. Then I offer an alternative vision in which we use assessment to build student confidence in the service of school improvement. Our Assessment Traditions Evidence of the strength of our collective belief that assessment for public accountability paves the way to school improvement can be seen in the history of large-scale assessment programs. We began to manifest this belief in the 1930s with the implementation of the "College Boards," a college admissions test that quickly turned into far more than that. These tests also known as the SAT became very important national measures of school accountability, too. If scores trend upward, the American education system is doing well. If they trend downward, stinging indictments of school quality pour forth from all sides. It's not uncommon for those in positions of political vulnerability to admonish teachers to "raise our average SAT scores. " Thus accountability for test scores is viewed as the key to productive educational change. In the 1950s and 1960s, we added commercially developed, norm-referenced, districtwide standardized testing programs in an effort to achieve local accountability. Ever since, superintendents and others in positions of authority have threatened drastic action if scores do not continually improve. The 1970s became the decade of the statewide testing program. We began the decade with three statewide assessments and ended it with nearly 40. Today, virtually every state has one. Legislatures promise their constituents that scores will go up or heads will roll a thinly veiled threat intended to spur educators to work harder. In the 1970s and 1980s, we implemented a national assessment program. In the 1980s and 1990s, we have discovered the political power of international assessments. Recent reports of math and science results in the media have led to worries that we had better raise our standing among the nations of the world or risk social and economic decay. Thus we see layer upon layer of tests, each new test expected to accomplish what the prior layers had not done spark productive school improvement. …