Position: Homeschools should not be forced to adopt state standards or submit to state testing.
Objection: Raised by “reality check” in the comment section of the Lincoln Journal Star blog.
” If parents are properly homeschooling their children, then a test should not be a problem. “
This argument is appealing on the surface. Many have the same reaction when certain surveillance activities are suggested to protect us from crime. If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about? It is tempting to respond with snarky quips like, “If you aren’t pushing drugs, police searching your home should not be a problem.” While this does illustrate a flaw in the reasoning, ie., people should only be subjected to searches, intellectual or physical, if they are suspected of wrongdoing, I would like to look at some of the underlying assumptions of the objection.
Why is testing objectionable to homeschoolers?
1) It assumes that the state’s measurements are valid and reliable enough to make a life-altering decision for each and every homeschooled child.
Interestingly, the National Education Association (NEA) objects to several key components of the No Child Left Behind Act, and is working to reform the bill as it is being discussed in the nation’s capital. Priority area number one:
- Use more than test scores to measure student learning and school performance.
- Include multiple measures of student learning and school effectiveness instead of the current one-day snapshot based solely on standardized tests.
- Reward progress over time to improve student achievement at all levels.
- Recognize individual needs of students (Special Education; English Language Learners.)
But if the teachers are teaching appropriately, why are they worried about the test? Because even the NEA recognizes that it is ridiculous to judge a child’s entire school year by a single test taken at the end of the year and then hold the teacher accountable for the results.
And specifically regarding the notion of “life altering decisions,” the companies behind this testing say that their tests should not be used this way. Their tests were designed to be one assessment of many, a sort of objective check against the real assessment done by a teacher in the classroom. They were not intended to be the sole determiner of whether little Johnny passes to the fourth grade…or is allowed to stay in his homeschool.
Because these tests are subject to error and subjective scoring, the testing industry’s code of conduct specifies that they not be the basis for life-altering decisions about students. Yet many states continue to use them for that purpose, and the industry has done little to stop it. The New York Times
For more on the negative effects of standardized testing, check my previous entry on No Child Left Behind, especially the comment thread.
A single test score should never be used to determine a child’s promotion or placement. (An aside, but I wonder whether Senator Schimek might at all be swayed by the NEA’s position on the use of standardized testing as an accountability measure given her strong alliance with the NEA?)
2) It assumes that the state rightfully oversees the education of the child.
That this is even entertained is telling in how far we have drifted from our founding principles. The fact that it is so widely accepted is disconcerting. July 4, 1776 America drafted a document that was a declaration to the world on what we thought just government was and where it came from. Children are still required to memorize it in school today. We just do not seem to apply it very often. An excerpt and some commentary:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
Meaning that they shouldn’t have to be explained.
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
Unalienable, meaning they cannot be taken from you. In fact, according to the dictionary, if something is unalienable you cannot even give it away.
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —
- Freedom from restraint, in a general sense, and applicable to the body, or to the will or mind. The body is at liberty, when not confined; the will or mind is at liberty, when not checked or controlled.
If liberty applies to the mind, and is unalienable, the state cannot direct education. Parents can certainly choose among all of the educational opportunities available to them, but the education system remains accountable to the parent. The parent is not accountable to the state.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —
Good government exists to secure these rights. And again, we look over the state. The state does not look over us. Tie this to the fourth amendment (the one about being secure in your person, houses, papers and effects and not being subject to searches without probable cause), and you can see why it is that homeschoolers so heartily object to state oversight and testing requirements.
It isn’t because we have something to hide. It is because in a free and just society, the state needs reason to believe we are hiding something before they come looking for it. The label of “homeschooler” is not probable cause.
This entry is the product of some of my thinking in regards to recent legislation which would limit the independence of homeschools in Nebraska. I wrote more on LB 1141 last week, and have also collected some contact information for those interested in writing their senators. Also note: I have started a section in my sidebar to track the bill’s progress in the senate and link to discussion on it. It has its first hearing date: February 26, 2008.
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For more information on LB 1141, you can click on the category LB 1141 and find everything I have written so far.
[tags]homeschool, homeschooling, LB 1141, testing[/tags]
Welcome to Roscommon Acres, my little home in the country. I write here about life more abundantly, from the joy of a baby’s smile to the almost unbearable grief of losing a son. I am seeking beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair (Isaiah 61:3).
Just place "Tiggy" in the subject line.
You have done a fine job thinking through the problem with testing. I would include… add to that the ninth amendment (the one about just because we made a list of a few ways that government is to be limited doesn’t mean that is the extent of its limitations… rights are retained by the people).
In addition to what you have already stated so well, I think testing assumes that all things worthy to be measured can be measured by a test. That leaves out all artistic expression and creativity. And testing assumes that children are not individuals who should have the freedom to progress at their own pace. They MUST read at a certain level by a certain age, regardless of any other factors in that child’s development, and if they aren’t up to these arbitrary standards, then something is ‘wrong’ with the child.
More and more I am seeing society treat childhood as a disease that needs to be cured.
And testing provides an way to measure how much money schools are going to get. If I’m not getting any money -not even on my tax return- then I’m not submitting to any testing, either.
That’s my snarky answer.
Very well, put, Dana. I know I have talked about my ps aunts and uncles and our yearly discussions here, before. I am never able to clearly say to them why it is wrong for the government to take interest in how my child is doing in homeschool.
Can I get an “Amen?”
Here’s one from me – amen!
Here’s a related attempt from NHEN’s legislative forums, which included a section for hot “in the public” issues. Standardized testing requirements always were a top concern there.
Some of us began to wonder if we could somehow craft testing arguments to protect home education specifically AND expose flaws in the testing craze generally, to help educate the public on its illogic and ill effects on all kids.
I still live in hope that we’ll develop an elegant and effective argument to provide “a broad, principled defense against everything” that politicians and the public think up to do to homeschoolers! Five years ago, this was my attempt:
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http://www.nhen.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=84
Reply author: JJ Ross
Replied on: February 20 2003
Betsy writes that West Virginia may consider mandating both testing and portfolios for homeschoolers. She asked for arguments against this. . .
. . .maybe it is not OUR argument that needs to be articulated. Maybe it would be more advantageous simply to articulate THEIR argument for requiring students to demonstrate achievement.
. . . I would describe the accepted justification for high-stakes testing like this:
1. Every child is an individual and can learn given individual attention, ergo,
2. All educational decisions should be made as close to the particular child and teacher as possible, ergo
3. Public schools are by definition accountable (to their public) for how well all those individual decisions add up to satisfactory learning results for all their students, ergo
4. The public requires its public schools to periodically measure the effect of those local decisions and report the aggregate results in terms of student achievement, so poor decisions and results can be corrected and improved.
Up to this point, it is a logical argument. After this, ps standardized testing veers off into the well-reported Horrors of Application (like communism, which sounds great until you actually try to implement it, but never mind.)
. . .[just] remember, it is not the student’s accountability to the public at issue in this argument, but the public decisions made on his behalf.
For your present need in W VA, point out that in the above argument for ps accountability, there is NO POINT that justifies any method of holding individual students accountable to the public (that *would* be communism or at least socialism, imo, and would require accepting a whole different rationale.)
So this notion of requiring both testing and portfolios is a ps notion based on the above accountability to the public argument – and it has no place in hs law without an articulated argument of its own, all of which NHEN and others have been able to refute when attempted.
Thus we can show fairly simply why it is specious/fallacious/legally flawed to remove required standardized testing from the logical context justified above (i.e. holding public schools accountable to their public for their decisions) and impose it for purposes other than justified above (i.e. forcing private citizens to submit their children to invasive mind probes designed to standardize their individual learning to government specifications.)
The reason it’s important to smoke out this argument and then use it to expose the leaps of logic in regulating hs, is that it provides a broad principled defense against everything.
Without it, hs can easily fall victim to legislative manipulation of all kinds, not only to assessment mandates, but to delivering any curriculum on which particular standards or accountability assessments are based, to physical attendance and performance requirements of all kinds, to curfews and age prohibitions, to mandatory exclusions and mandatory inclusions, even to assessment of particular attitudes and beliefs (colleges do this shamelessly already.) And of course, to the carrot-and-hickory-stick stakes that go along with legislative mandates.
Explicitly laying out their accountability argument and showing we don’t “fit” anywhere in it can help defend against all of the above, imo. Ideally, we would all do this all the time as a public awareness campaign, not just in legislative testimony in one place the day before the bill is passed, but . . . FWIW.
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And amen to sunniemom for noting: “That leaves out all artistic expression and creativity.”
Favorite Daughter’s final exam essay in college humanities was on this very point, to argue that the survival of the human race depends on our investments in artistic creativity and expression.
http://misedjj.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/i-actually-wrote-this-for-a-class/
Think evil robot overlords!)
Well I hope you send that to your Senator, Dana. That is a very well written piece. And a copy to a local Editor might even reach a few more thinking minds
Thank you, everyone! I have a LOT more to say about testing, but I didn’t think anyone would spend the entire day reading every objection I could think of. : )
The biggest problem to me is what JJRoss was talking about, ie., that the whole point of standardized testing is to provide a measure for parents to keep their schools accountable to them. The testing being discussed for NE public schools is not so that Governnor Heineman knows what is going on in the classroom, nor even so that Bush does. The intent is to give more information to parents.
There is a wealth of information against the use of “high stakes” testing out there. And requiring a child to pass or be removed from his homeschool certainly qualifies as “high stakes.” There is even at least one study which found that when states began using this kind of testing in the public schools, all measures of academic success declined in those states.
And then comes the other aspect, which may become a later post. It is something of what Sunniemom said about art. And the idea that there is more to education than filling in bubbles. A lot of homeschoolers initially pulled their children from the public school in order to escape that mentality, and if anyone has any more information on that, I’d love to see it!
But also, there is a whole philosophy out there about the benefits of starting formal education later. Learning to read later. And it is based on the same foundational philosophies I learned in my education courses at KU, a respected university in the education field. There, we talked about “developmentally appropriate instruction.”
This form of assessment, required of homeschools, would make impossible to have any philosophy of education different from the state. What does this do to followers of Dr. Raymond Moore? His books are based on the same things I learned in pursuit of my education degree, ie., the concept of readiness and developmentally appropriate instruction. I left reading to my daughter’s developmental timeline, which would have had her forced into public schools since she was significantly behind in first and part of second. But now she is above grade level.
And to unschooling? Why can’t children be allowed to develop at different paces?
Dana- ditto that about Dr. Moore- I used their methodologies with my dd and ds, and started them a bit later than the PS system requires. They went from ‘first grade’ material to ‘fifth grade’ material in one year. Being bound by state testing requirements would leave me with no choice but to ‘teach to the test’ at the pace the state required. Like, duh- why would I want to do that? I’d rather stick a fork in my eye!
Have you read Chris Carter’s article on standardized testing? http://testcritic.homestead.com/files/standardized_tests.html
Banesh Hoffman, professor of mathematics and former collaborator with Albert Einstein, made exactly this point in his 1962 book The Tyranny of Testing. According to Dr. Hoffman, it is the multiple-choice format that is to blame. “Multiple choice tests penalize the deep student, dampen creativity, foster intellectual dishonesty, and undermine the very foundations of education” he remarked in a 1977 interview.
High stakes, indeed! How much pressure is on a student who knows there are such life-altering consequences for not passing a test?
When you started breaking down each part of those wonderful words regarding rights from God all I could think about was the scene from My Fair Lady where they’d been up all night attempting to iron out proper pronunciation. Eliza finally got it right and Professor Hill said, “Again…”, followed with, “By George she’s got it!”
Well, By George You’ve got it, now figure out how to get the others to listen to how well you put it. Bravo, Eliza…
One of the best articles that I have read on this subject. I can’t wait to share the link.
Another objection is ‘Who is watching the homeschoolers?”
Well who is?
The entire nation on ESPN as homeschoolers continually win the National Spelling Bee.
I’m currently reading a very interesting book call The Poisoned Apple: The Bell Curve Crisis and How Our Schools Create Mediocrity and Failure” by Betty Wallace & William Graves. It talks about how standardized tests are norm-referenced and therefore designed to sort children rather than to tell us what they’re actually learning.
You could stick my DD in any school in the country and she’d still score above-average on a standardized test. You could likely predict fairly accurately what she’d score simply based on her family background characteristics (class, race & ethnicity, native tongue, parents’ marital status, parents’ educational level, etc).
Dana I really enjoyed your thoughts on this. You take the arguement against standardized testing for homeschoolers to a higher level of analysis. Bravo.
Thanks, ChristineMM.