Page 314 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

286 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Second, it is important to know about and implement research-based principles of effective teaching. These principles have enduring validity and applicability, not just for social studies but for all school subjects.
The Current High-Stakes Testing Environment
Education will always be partly an art, but it also should be partly applied science in which an established base of validated procedures is gradually expanded and refined in response to gradual advances in its scientific knowledge base. Unfortunately, edu- cation in this country has not had a history of responding in a consensual way to advances in the knowledge base. Instead, it has featured often hotly contested calls for relatively extreme measures, typically based on educational or political ideology rather than reputable research. Some of the “reforms” have been ill-conceived and impractical, but essentially harmless. Others have been counterproductive—doing more harm than good.
In our view, the recent and ongoing high-stakes testing era has been one of the most counterproductive periods in our educational history. At a time when more and more of society’s burdens and responsibilities have been shifted from the family and other social institutions to the school, politicians have been emphasizing “reforms” that feature unre- alistic demands and punitive responses to failures. Initially in many states, and later at the federal level legislation, schools have been forced to administer more and more tests, with higher and higher stakes attached to students’ test scores.
Although contrary to the spirit of many educational purposes and goals, high-stakes testing policies would be difficult for informed educators to contest if they were based on solid research or demonstrably successful. They are neither. These policies do little if any good and a lot of harm. It is true that mobilizing to prepare students to take high-stakes tests will raise their test scores, but the raised test scores do not mean much when the tests are mostly confined to memory for discrete information or disconnected subskills, and the improved scores mostly reflect specific test preparation rather than improved learning across the curriculum as a whole. In Texas, for example, a focus on preparing students to take the state’s achievement test did in fact succeed in raising students’ scores on those tests, but the students’ scores on national assessments, college entrance exams, and the like remained unchanged (Amrein & Berliner, 2003). In high-stakes testing environments, improved test scores no longer have the meaning they might have had before the stakes were raised.
Even former advocates of accountability efforts have concluded that recent emphases on testing and accountability have “hijacked” the standards movement, turning it into a system of punishment and rewards rather than one of learning and education (Ravitch, 2010). The No Child Left Behind Act has made testing and accountability a central part of school reform. Unfortunately, such emphasis has had deleterious effects on curriculum and instruction, particularly in social studies education. As we have mentioned before, since social studies is not tested with the same frequency as literacy and mathematics, the instructional time allotted to it has decreased. Thus, social studies teaching has become a victim of the accountability era in several ways.
The benefits of mobilizing to raise test scores are dubious, but the costs are not. Thomas (2005) identified and documented quite a list of what he called “collateral dam- age” from high-stakes testing: narrowing of the curriculum, both in the sense of cutting back on teaching other subjects to focus on teaching the subjects tested, and in the sense of focusing instruction in the subjects tested on the material likely to be included in the test, at the expense of a richer coverage; the high costs of implementing testing and its
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