Fairfax County Superintendent Jack Dale and leaders of four other Virginia school systems are urging the State Board of Education to change certain testing requirements associated with the Standards of Learning tests.
SOL testing began in 1998, four years before the federal No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law. They address student achievement in four main subject areas: English, mathematics, science, and history/social science and are currently administered in May or June. Students’ results are a factor in determining school accreditation.
SOL critics complain that the standardized tests are detrimental to educators and that the curriculum they are obligated to teach is restricted to the material that they are told will be on the test. This method of teaching is commonly referred to as “teaching to the test” because instructors do not receive much of an opportunity to teach other relevant information.
According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, creative and thought-provoking teaching methods are also often sacrificed in order to teach children what is required for the standardized tests.
“Our students are bored,” said Dale in an interview with the Washington Post, “because they’re not doing the hands-on kind of learning that they’re great at.”
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia Wright disagrees.
“I am a teacher at heart … and I just find it hard to believe that teachers can’t be creative and they can’t teach enriched curriculum while at the same time making sure that students have basic knowledge and skills,” said Wright during the State Board of Education Meeting. “And I think there are teachers all across the commonwealth who are doing that, who may be offended at the notion that it can’t be done.”
Another issue associated with SOL testing is the pressure placed on students to perform well. Beginning in third grade, students are aware that they are required to do well on these tests and often suffer anxiety before taking them. This is especially stressful for elementary and middle school students who are not allowed to retake failed SOL tests. High school students, however, are given the opportunity to retake the tests several times during the year.
The suggested changes to the testing requirements include administering reading and mathematics SOL tests during the first semester and offering retakes for students who fail them. The superintendents wrote in a letter to Wright that doing so would allow the students to demonstrate proficiency earlier in the year and move on to focus on material that might not be included in the SOL curriculum for the remainder of the school year.
English teacher Ron Smith believes that this would be beneficial to English classes because the majority of students would be able to pass the SOL in the first semester of the school year. Furthermore, if someone were to fail the early SOL test, instructors would know exactly where the problems were. They would then be able to address them and prepare the students to retest later in the year.
However, Smith does not believe this would work as well with other subjects and doesn’t see the point of rescheduling only one subject’s SOLs.
“If you can’t move them all up, then don’t move any up,” said Smith.
The proposal has also failed to gain support from Wright and a number of other board members who feel that SOL curriculum cannot be covered into a single semester.
“What you’re saying doesn’t make sense to me,” said Elizabeth D. Beamer during the State Board of Education Meeting. “If you move the testing schedule to January, some students haven’t even had the opportunity to learn all of the material yet.”
Some state leaders also have fiscal concerns. The state spends about $35.6 million annually to administer the tests and re-testing students in third through eighth grades would add to that cost. Furthermore, the system is not set up for elementary testing in the first semester and doing so would necessitate a monetary investment.
The superintendents plan to meet to discuss the state board’s apprehensions and come back with a formal request for them to consider.