This article at Kairos discusses the problem posed by the use of standardized testing to determine standards of learning. I agree with Joel English's articulation of this situation as one in which pedagogy and authentic assessment are taken out of the equation and are replaced with standardized testing. Large-scale testing cannot assure that all students have learned the same material in the same way; still, teachers who want to keep their jobs react by "teaching to the test" as best they can. In this environment, all the scholarship that suggests teachers should employ multiple learning styles, intelligences and authentic assessment is discarded in favor of preparing for a pencil-n-paper exam that no one, not even the teacher, sees before it is given. From his Diagram, English accurately points out: "When standardized tests become the tool for assessment and "accountability" is applied like a monkey wrench to teachers and students, that tool becomes the determiner of every lesson plan, every discussion, every subject of study in the classroom--every turn of the pipe."

But most of us have heard the diatribe against teaching to the test -- there must be something, some misconception, fueling the desire to test students (and teachers) in this way: Former assistant superintendent of Virginia Beach public schools Anne Meek opens her assessment of the Virginia Standards of Learning by attempting to unravel a basic supposition of the system: "The assumption underlying the standards is that if we simply buckle down and focus on basic academic subjects, all will be well in educationland" (9).

. . . And that has never been the case. The "Back-to-Basics" push is a neo-conservative backlash against what is perceived as touchy-feely teaching practices and has no basis whatsoever in any kind of scholarship I have ever heard of. Students who are taught in only one learning style suffer not only because some of them will not favor that style (and thus "underperform"), but they will miss the opportunity to develop skills a c r o s s learning styles, developing latent or emerging skill sets. For example, the traditional "visual" learner typically does well in school because she can just read the book and ace the exam. If the class and its assessment do not require her to talk about or apply what she has learned, she might still do well on a traditional exam. However, if the student was required to discuss the material with other students (using an "auditory" learning style or interpersonal intelligence) and collaborate on a project involving some kind of "test" of that material, she would have had to develop more critical thinking skills in order to succeed. Therefore, according to English, "this outlook on the Standards requires that the learning be assessed through authentic means of measurement, such as writing portfolios and other holistic tools that focus on student writing, participation, work, and other involvement."