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The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better
For decades we’ve been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there’s still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they’re doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?
High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation’s foremost experts on educational testing, argues in The Testing Charade that the whole idea of test-based accountability has failed—it has increasingly become an end in itself, harming students and corrupting the very ideals of teaching. In this powerful polemic, built on unimpeachable evidence and rooted in decades of experience with educational testing, Koretz calls out high-stakes testing as a sham, a false idol that is ripe for manipulation and shows little evidence of leading to educational improvement. Rather than setting up incentives to divert instructional time to pointless test prep, he argues, we need to measure what matters, and measure it in multiple ways—not just via standardized tests.
Right now, we’re lying to ourselves about whether our children are learning. And the longer we accept that lie, the more damage we do. It’s time to end our blind reliance on high-stakes tests. With The Testing Charade , Daniel Koretz insists that we face the facts and change course, and he gives us a blueprint for doing better.
283 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2019
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324 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 20, 2018
Fascinating look at the problems around high stakes testing and some suggestions about how to address them--mainly stopping these kinds of tests and using a variety of measures for student achievement and other ways to hold teachers accountable including a variety of supports for and ways of evaluating them. He examines the issues of cheating by teachers and administration, from outright changing answers or overtly coaching students to bad test prep (that eliminates much of the curriculum from a subject to focus on what will be tested), eliminating other subjects, such as social studies, science, as well as the arts and recess since they're not tested, and having low performing students not take the tests using several different (unethical) ways of keeping them away.
Perhaps as a teacher, I felt he was a little harsh on the quality of teaching in this country; I've seen too many excellent as well as simply good teachers. Also, I'm less optimistic than he is about the values of testing in general to really assess student learning. There are (as he admits) so many variables of what is learned in school, including a curiosity about life and learning, character development, social development, and growth in other subjects in addition to reading and math. Also, Common Core isolates reading into small, usually non-fiction passages, eliminating the context of a text and missing out on developing the stamina needed to read longer texts as well as the imagination needed to read fictional ones (an imagination needed to problem solve in business later on as well as in life).
I found the statistics hard to understand because I'm just not educated enough in that area to evaluate his conclusions. Although his explanations were logical and clearly presented.
All in all, one of the most valuable works on the subject that I have read. Should be required reading for everyone in this country: not just teachers, administrators, parents, and lawmakers but everyone interested in the process by which children become thinking and productive adult citizens, capable of not only working but also living a creative and productive life.
Perhaps as a teacher, I felt he was a little harsh on the quality of teaching in this country; I've seen too many excellent as well as simply good teachers. Also, I'm less optimistic than he is about the values of testing in general to really assess student learning. There are (as he admits) so many variables of what is learned in school, including a curiosity about life and learning, character development, social development, and growth in other subjects in addition to reading and math. Also, Common Core isolates reading into small, usually non-fiction passages, eliminating the context of a text and missing out on developing the stamina needed to read longer texts as well as the imagination needed to read fictional ones (an imagination needed to problem solve in business later on as well as in life).
I found the statistics hard to understand because I'm just not educated enough in that area to evaluate his conclusions. Although his explanations were logical and clearly presented.
All in all, one of the most valuable works on the subject that I have read. Should be required reading for everyone in this country: not just teachers, administrators, parents, and lawmakers but everyone interested in the process by which children become thinking and productive adult citizens, capable of not only working but also living a creative and productive life.
December 3, 2017
In The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, author Daniel Koretz, a Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, clearly and persuasively breaks down how our standardized test accountability system has been a spectacular failure, and yet so many of our educational and political leaders still blindly and/or stubbornly believe that high stakes, punitive testing can improve our students’ educational achievement. Some even call for more testing of “soft” skills, such as grit and social emotional learning.
The truth: according to National Research Council, with the exception of fourth grade math scores, our billions of dollars and hours spent on testing have resulted in no improvement in student scores over a thirty-year period. And even that “gain” does not persist through the upper grades. What about the famous achievement gap between underperforming sub groups and middle class white students? Since the 1980s, The NAEP Long-Term Trend assessment showed no narrowing of the achievement gap between these groups. Still, there is little public discussion on changing paths. ESSA, the revised version of No Child Left Behind, still requires federal approval of state accountability plans.
Koretz is not against measurement per se, but he emphasizes we must measure what matters, which he sums up as the Big Three: student achievement, educators’ practices, and classroom climate.
Koretz explains concepts, such as Campbell’s Law, which show how deceptive and superficial test score gains can be. He cites an example from auto safety standards. When the safety of the driver’s seat was tested, its safety improved, but the safety of the passenger seat declined. Why? It wasn’t tested. Don Campbell, one of the founders of science program evaluations and for whom the law is named, noticed that when you measure one domain, attaching penalties for failure, you gain in that domain while losing ground in the untested areas. Furthermore, our current testing regime leads to the unwanted consequences of cheating, bad test prep, the narrowing of the curriculum, score inflation, and superficial learning. Some teachers are even coached by districts to ignore certain domains in the curriculum because they are not tested. In central Texas, certain low-income, low-performing elementary schools ignore Social Studies because it isn’t tested at that level. This omission is especially disturbing when we remember that one of the goals of universal education is to foster good citizenship.
At the same time, our tests don’t measure what we should treasure: inquiry-based teaching, engaged students, project-based learning, and collaborative problem solving--- skills essential to the ever-changing American workplace.
As an educator, one of my favorite parts of the book is when Koretz contrasts two observed math lessons. One teacher asks her elementary students if a triangle or a rectangle can support more weight. The lesson begins with a student asking, “What do you mean by more weight?” A robust discussion ensues; the children come up with a hypothesis, and then the teacher distributes manipulative models of both shapes so that students can concretely test their assumptions. In contrast, a high school math teacher asks students to solve a problem. After several wrong guesses, she asks a student: What’s the rule? This student then recites the memorized rule, and that’s that. Which teacher would you want for your child? And yet the latter teacher’s students may do just fine on standardized tests.
Koretz goes on to examine what other countries are doing, specifically Finland, Holland, Singapore, and Japan, to consider other approaches. While some of their methods and practices are worth exploring, one fact remains: no other nation emphasizes punitive, high-stakes testing as does the United States. The question for all of us: is it worth it?
The truth: according to National Research Council, with the exception of fourth grade math scores, our billions of dollars and hours spent on testing have resulted in no improvement in student scores over a thirty-year period. And even that “gain” does not persist through the upper grades. What about the famous achievement gap between underperforming sub groups and middle class white students? Since the 1980s, The NAEP Long-Term Trend assessment showed no narrowing of the achievement gap between these groups. Still, there is little public discussion on changing paths. ESSA, the revised version of No Child Left Behind, still requires federal approval of state accountability plans.
Koretz is not against measurement per se, but he emphasizes we must measure what matters, which he sums up as the Big Three: student achievement, educators’ practices, and classroom climate.
Koretz explains concepts, such as Campbell’s Law, which show how deceptive and superficial test score gains can be. He cites an example from auto safety standards. When the safety of the driver’s seat was tested, its safety improved, but the safety of the passenger seat declined. Why? It wasn’t tested. Don Campbell, one of the founders of science program evaluations and for whom the law is named, noticed that when you measure one domain, attaching penalties for failure, you gain in that domain while losing ground in the untested areas. Furthermore, our current testing regime leads to the unwanted consequences of cheating, bad test prep, the narrowing of the curriculum, score inflation, and superficial learning. Some teachers are even coached by districts to ignore certain domains in the curriculum because they are not tested. In central Texas, certain low-income, low-performing elementary schools ignore Social Studies because it isn’t tested at that level. This omission is especially disturbing when we remember that one of the goals of universal education is to foster good citizenship.
At the same time, our tests don’t measure what we should treasure: inquiry-based teaching, engaged students, project-based learning, and collaborative problem solving--- skills essential to the ever-changing American workplace.
As an educator, one of my favorite parts of the book is when Koretz contrasts two observed math lessons. One teacher asks her elementary students if a triangle or a rectangle can support more weight. The lesson begins with a student asking, “What do you mean by more weight?” A robust discussion ensues; the children come up with a hypothesis, and then the teacher distributes manipulative models of both shapes so that students can concretely test their assumptions. In contrast, a high school math teacher asks students to solve a problem. After several wrong guesses, she asks a student: What’s the rule? This student then recites the memorized rule, and that’s that. Which teacher would you want for your child? And yet the latter teacher’s students may do just fine on standardized tests.
Koretz goes on to examine what other countries are doing, specifically Finland, Holland, Singapore, and Japan, to consider other approaches. While some of their methods and practices are worth exploring, one fact remains: no other nation emphasizes punitive, high-stakes testing as does the United States. The question for all of us: is it worth it?
June 4, 2019
So this book is different from all the other’s I normally read. Non-fiction pertaining to a specific part of education reform which has to do with student testing. Sounds dull doesn’t it, if your not a teacher and you don’t have school age children you can just skip over this review it doesn’t apply to you. My interests are professional I support the tests in that most of my career has been as a computer technician in a major school district and most of what I do is to support the tests. I’ve been doing it for years and the one thing I know is “Yeah tests do not work and they are a horrible measure of school performance.” So allow me to back up some and give a quick personal framework for how I feel about this issue. Back in 2004 I started in LA unified in a inner city school we had all the issues associated with working in a poor neighborhood, I’ve had student aids who were homeless, I’ve seen girls crying as they lookup their father’s booking number so they could try a schedule a visit, on and on many stories like those but were we a bad school No I don’t think so. We had a majority of staff members who lived in the neighborhood some who graduated from this same middle school we had a community we worked together we were a good team in fact there is a book about us and it’s one of my very favorite books of all time. If you have read this so far and your interested in good books about school (fiction this time) you should check it out. Matthew 18 A story of redemption
Talk about staff quality we had one of the original Mad men from Chicago publishing days working at our school doing a second career as a Math teacher who did a third career as a writer and wrote this book, anyway this gives you a good feel of what our school was like at the time. Then NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND came along and F***ed us good. We had five years to raise our API score and every year we did raise our scores but the final year we were four points away from our target goal. The Superintendent argued with the school board we should be allow to continue but board member Monica Garica, and a majority of board members who were all supported by charter schools voted to dissolve our school and give it over to a charter. We were all fired, even the janitors and custodial staff! District found us other placements but our community based team was scattered to the wind. I now have a two hour train and bus commute every day one way to work four hours travel total and I’ve been doing that for years now it’s a boom for my reading, I work in a very highly ranked middle school in a wealthy section of Los Angeles the type of school that when we are printing school ID cards up I’ve had students 14 years old saying “do you have change for a hundred? “ Regardless of which work environment I’m in the test is still a problem. One thing that author Daniel Koretz didn’t mention in this book was coding issues. Every year some problems on the test are due to poor coding for example: A secure browser time lockout issue - if a student takes too long to answer a test question either because there is a lot of reading involved or they are daydreaming or figuring out the slope and radius by hand on paper the computer or tablet or chromebook or ipad will time out eventually and go to sleep you lose your secure browser connection and you have to log off and log back in be approved all over again just to get back to the question you were working on and you don’t know this all you know is the whatever you type whatever answer you eventually put down and then hit next the computer will freeze up or just clear your answer and go back to the same question. (This is a problem that has plagued the test for years) same with placing a dot on a graph well there is a key stroke for deleting a red dot I think on a chrome book it was something like cntl + shift + del or it might have been options right click anyhow the math test also seems to be testing to see if 6th and 7th graders can also figure out complex unexplained key stokes for clearing mistakes otherwise the problem will look like it had a bad case of the measles. The technical issues goes on and on after 15 years of doing the tests I still see issues every year, not as bad as the early years I’ll grant you but still 4 or 5 embedded bugs in every test. I came to the conclusion on my own years ago that these tests were a huge waste of time and resources. This book just reinforced that ideal.
Now for a musical interlude please click on Not on the test
After that and if your still with me might as well watch Robert Wright explain what the issue with testing in education is here
four stars for this book not because it was so compelling it’s rather wonky but the author certainly knows his subject and if your interested in this sort of stuff you will learn something from this book.
Talk about staff quality we had one of the original Mad men from Chicago publishing days working at our school doing a second career as a Math teacher who did a third career as a writer and wrote this book, anyway this gives you a good feel of what our school was like at the time. Then NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND came along and F***ed us good. We had five years to raise our API score and every year we did raise our scores but the final year we were four points away from our target goal. The Superintendent argued with the school board we should be allow to continue but board member Monica Garica, and a majority of board members who were all supported by charter schools voted to dissolve our school and give it over to a charter. We were all fired, even the janitors and custodial staff! District found us other placements but our community based team was scattered to the wind. I now have a two hour train and bus commute every day one way to work four hours travel total and I’ve been doing that for years now it’s a boom for my reading, I work in a very highly ranked middle school in a wealthy section of Los Angeles the type of school that when we are printing school ID cards up I’ve had students 14 years old saying “do you have change for a hundred? “ Regardless of which work environment I’m in the test is still a problem. One thing that author Daniel Koretz didn’t mention in this book was coding issues. Every year some problems on the test are due to poor coding for example: A secure browser time lockout issue - if a student takes too long to answer a test question either because there is a lot of reading involved or they are daydreaming or figuring out the slope and radius by hand on paper the computer or tablet or chromebook or ipad will time out eventually and go to sleep you lose your secure browser connection and you have to log off and log back in be approved all over again just to get back to the question you were working on and you don’t know this all you know is the whatever you type whatever answer you eventually put down and then hit next the computer will freeze up or just clear your answer and go back to the same question. (This is a problem that has plagued the test for years) same with placing a dot on a graph well there is a key stroke for deleting a red dot I think on a chrome book it was something like cntl + shift + del or it might have been options right click anyhow the math test also seems to be testing to see if 6th and 7th graders can also figure out complex unexplained key stokes for clearing mistakes otherwise the problem will look like it had a bad case of the measles. The technical issues goes on and on after 15 years of doing the tests I still see issues every year, not as bad as the early years I’ll grant you but still 4 or 5 embedded bugs in every test. I came to the conclusion on my own years ago that these tests were a huge waste of time and resources. This book just reinforced that ideal.
Now for a musical interlude please click on Not on the test
After that and if your still with me might as well watch Robert Wright explain what the issue with testing in education is here
four stars for this book not because it was so compelling it’s rather wonky but the author certainly knows his subject and if your interested in this sort of stuff you will learn something from this book.
September 1, 2020
This is an excellent intro to the limitations of standardized testing. The author has harsh judgment for the overemphasis of standardized testing because of the harm it causes.
My only real criticism is of the "Coaching: section in Chapter 7: Test Prep. I would say that the author conflates smart test taking strategies with taking away from education. But, to me, he never makes a serious attempt at justifying it. For example, why is teaching students to eliminate the most obviously wrong answers in a multiple choice exam bad? The closest the author gets is to say that you are not sure if the student actually knows the answer, or just knows strategies. But that misses the point. Strategies like this are simple and very fast to teach. They should be taught. If students can "inflate" their scores with this method, then the test makers should improve. This isn't a waste of instructional time. Most of the strategies he calls "coaching"in a negative sense are simply good teaching if done quickly.
But, beyond this criticism, the book is a great intro to the subject of standardized testing.
My only real criticism is of the "Coaching: section in Chapter 7: Test Prep. I would say that the author conflates smart test taking strategies with taking away from education. But, to me, he never makes a serious attempt at justifying it. For example, why is teaching students to eliminate the most obviously wrong answers in a multiple choice exam bad? The closest the author gets is to say that you are not sure if the student actually knows the answer, or just knows strategies. But that misses the point. Strategies like this are simple and very fast to teach. They should be taught. If students can "inflate" their scores with this method, then the test makers should improve. This isn't a waste of instructional time. Most of the strategies he calls "coaching"in a negative sense are simply good teaching if done quickly.
But, beyond this criticism, the book is a great intro to the subject of standardized testing.
October 28, 2024
Read this for a class and I thought it was pretty interesting and enlightening but was way too long. He would explain a point (very well, might I add) but would then go on to continue proving and repeating that point. If you’re looking to see if what he’s claiming is true this is definitely the book for you because there is a lot of evidence and when I say a lot I mean A LOT. But if you just want an overview or more explanatory text about the subject, you would be skipping about half of the book (the repetitive bits). I liked his writing, it was very clear and easy to follow but he just went on for waaaay too long on some of the topics.
August 13, 2020
This book is a includes a clear-eyed view of standardized testing and teacher accountability. Easy read, substantiated points. I wish Koretz had given more details about alternatives to the standardized testing movement.
May 30, 2018
Everything you think you know about testing is probably wrong. This book explains why.
February 21, 2019
An excellent book that deals with the issue of (over) testing in America today. Great for book club or neighborhood discussions!
April 11, 2022
Read for an education elective class; an interesting look at the failure of standardized testing reform and current teacher evaluation systems, with helpful insights as to how we might do better.
April 21, 2022
Easy to read, engaging, and really interesting. Would recommend for someone interested in learning more about the pitfalls of standardized testing in the U.S.
June 25, 2025
Comprehensive discussion of issues surrounding test-based accountability in US education system. I wish the author could go in-depth on the methods used to draw conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews