U NITED STATES

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the middle of one. “She had a complete meltdown,” Neely-Randall told the HPR. “And I could do nothing to ®©@©
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For Neely-Randall, this was a “turning point,” because she realized, “I can no longer be part of the prob­ A®©®©
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third to eighth grade and imposed increasingly harsh punishments on schools that failed to make “adequate
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SU M M E R 2015 H A R V A R D PO LITIC A L R E V IE W 17
 UNITED STATES
nationwide were labeled as “failing” because they could not
make adequate yearly progress.
The law has come with a hefty price tag for taxpayers. A 2012
study by the Brookings Institution determined that states spend
$1.7 billion per year on testing, an enormous increase over the
$423 million states spent in 2001 before NCLB, according to the
Pew Center on the States. All of this money has fueled a booming
testing industry, with companies like Pearson racking up billions
in sales. A Politico investigation published on February 10, 2015
revealed that Pearson receives tens of millions in taxpayer dol­
lars even though there is “little proof its products and services
are effective.”
Now, with politicians on the left and the right dismissing
NCLB as a failure, Congress is set to rewrite the law, and there is
a vigorous debate over whether to keep the annual testing man­
date. From the conviction of 11 teachers in Atlanta on racketeer­
ing charges following a high-profile cheating scandal to the rapid
growth of the opt-out movement, evidence is mounting that the
accountability system is broken.
“TOTAL TESTING INSANITY”
Because standardized tests determine which classes her stu­
dents will get into in middle school, Neely-Randall realizes she
has to put her objections to the side and prepare them as best
she can. She tried to show them a practice PARCC exam, but
when she asked her students to write down what they thought
about the test, one student wrote, “I feel like we have to take all
18 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SU M M E R 2015
these tests and if I pass the tests I live and if I don’t, I die.” This
was extremely alarming for Neely-Randall. “I was horrified. I
mean, I really was horrified. Because they were just freaking
out.”
The focus on test prep eats up time that could be spent doing
hands-on projects and collaborative, interactive activities. Neely-
Randall said, “In the beginning, we were doing all of these great
projects and they were fluent readers and writers ... and then all
of a sudden, I had to stop everything to get them ready for a test.”
In fact, according to a report published in 2013 by the Ameri­
can Federation of Teachers (AFT), students in heavily tested
grades can spend over 110 hours per year doing test prep, and as
many as 50 hours per year taking the tests themselves, a total of
roughly 15 percent of their instructional time.
The schools that have been forced to devote the most time
to test prep are those in the most disadvantaged communities,
because they have to achieve the biggest increases in test scores
under NCLB’s mandates. Robert Schaeffer, the public educa­
tion director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing,
explained in an interview with the HPR, “In those kinds of
schools, the curriculum becomes test prep: doing worksheets
and practice tests and getting ready for the big test.” A report
from the Center for American Progress substantiates Schaeffer’s
claim, demonstrating that urban high school students spend as
much as 266 percent more time taking standardized tests than
their suburban counterparts do.
This increased focus on test prep has had a profoundly nega­
tive impact on the quality of education many students receive.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of

Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in America, said
in an interview with the HPR that the narrow focus on tested
subjects causes students to become disengaged at school. “Most
kids I know are so anxious about the high-stakes consequences
of these tests right now that they hate school, but yet they can be
really engaged if we engage them through music or through art
or through projects.”
Because only math and reading test scores count towards a
school’s “adequate yearly progress” under NCLB, schools have
de-emphasized, and in some cases completely stopped, teaching
things like “social studies, literature, art, music, physical educa­
tion, and other important topics where test scores do not result
in judgments of school quality,” writes Richard Rothstein in his
2004 book Class and Schools. A 2006 study by the Center on
Education Policy supported this claim, finding that since NCLB
was passed, 71 percent of school districts cut back on subjects
like history and music so they could spend more time on the
tested subjects.
Some experts, however, do not see this narrowing of the
curriculum as a necessarily bad thing. In an interview with the
HPR, Chester E. Finn, Jr., a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Ford-
ham Institute, an education policy think tank, explained, “Until
you’ve got kids at least minimally proficient in reading and math,
you’re really not going to have very much success teaching them
anything else.” Grover Whitehurst, the director of the Brown
Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, echoed
this sentiment in an interview with the HPR, saying that “kids
are not well served by marching band if, in fact, they can’t read
and do math.”
Yet even within the tested subjects of reading and math, an
overemphasis on standardized testing hurts the quality of in­
struction students receive. The current system of accountability,
which uses the same tests to measure trends in achievement and
to evaluate teachers, necessarily promotes teaching to the test,
according to Derek Neal, an economics professor at the Univer­
sity of Chicago. As he explained in an interview with the HPR,
tracking progress “requires that these tests be designed in a
way that they yield comparable scores across time. The demand
for comparability... will inevitably lead to predictability, and
once you have predictability, then the teachers are going to be
tempted to coach, and not teach.”
GAMING THE SYSTEM: TESTING AS AN
ACCOUNTABILITY MEASURE
In April, hundreds of thousands of public school students
from grades three through eight in New York take high-stakes
tests in English Language Arts and Mathematics. Jeanette Deu-
termann’s son is not one of them.
Deutermann, a Long Island parent and critic of New York’s
test-based accountability system, told the HPR in an interview
that she witnessed her school’s relentless focus on standardized
testing transform her son, who is now in sixth grade, from some­
one who never complained about going to school to someone
who intensely dreaded it. “He would be doing homework, and
U NITED STATES
he would be sobbing, he’d be trying to wipe tears away while
he’s trying to finish his homework so he could see the paper. He
would constantly talk about how stupid he was, how ‘I can’t wait
until I can drop out of school.’”
Deutermann knew her son was not the best test-taker, but
she also knew that his teachers were excellent, and that their
evaluations depended on his test scores. So, for the past two
years, Deutermann has opted her son out of the state tests in
ELA and math. She explained, “This was not in opposition to the
school, but in support.” She created a Facebook group to provide
information to Long Island parents about opting their children
out of tests, which now has over 17,000 members. She also be­
came part of the steering committee for the advocacy group New
York State Allies for Public Education, which opposes excessive
standardized testing.
Last year, tens of thousands of parents across the country
joined Deutermann in refusing to let their children take the
tests, with 60,000 in New York alone. This year, the movement
has continued to gain momentum, with hundreds of students
opting out of tests in New Mexico, 3,000 students in Florida, and
over 40,000 in New Jersey. But the biased test outcomes result­
ing from high numbers of student opt-outs are just one way that
standardized tests may provide an inaccurate measure for evalu­
ating teachers, and they are by far the least insidious.
There are myriad ways that test scores can be manipulated to
make a student or a school appear to be doing better than they
actually are. For example, states have lowered the scores stu­
dents need to pass, according to a 2009 report published in the
International Journal o f Education Policy and Leadership. Thus,
while it is true that the number of students scoring “proficient”
on state standardized tests has risen, real student achievement
has not necessarily improved. Low-stakes diagnostic tests, which
are not subject to this type of manipulation because they are
not attached to rewards or punishments for teachers or schools,
confirm this finding. Math and reading scores on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress have improved incremen­
tally at best, and they have actually declined on the Programme
for International Student Assessment.
Schools and administrators have also pressured low-perform­
ing students to drop out or enter special education programs in
order to raise overall test scores. According to a 2010 report from
the civil rights organization Advancement Project, “the practice
of pushing struggling students out of school to boost test scores
has become quite common.” And a 2002 study from researchers
at Arizona State University found a correlation between high-
stakes testing and “higher numbers of low performing students
being suspended before testing days, expelled from school
before tests, or being reclassified as exempt from testing because
they are determined to be either Special Education or Limited
English Proficient (LEP).”
Yet many proponents of annual high-stakes standardized
testing continue to argue in its favor by framing it as a civil rights
issue. In a January 2015 Senate debate over the reauthoriza­
tion of NCLB, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) argued, “We know
that if we don't have ways to measure students' progress, and
S U M M E R 2 0 1 5 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 19
 UNITED STATES
if we don't hold our states accountable, the victims will invari­
ably be the kids from poor neighborhoods, children of color, and
students with disabilities.” However, there are plenty of other
non-annual, low-stakes tests not mandated by NCLB, like the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, that demonstrate
this achievement gap without many of the harmful consequenc­
es associated with their high-stakes counterparts.
Furthermore, arguments like Murray’s assume that standard­
ized tests are good proxies for student learning, which often­
times is not the case. According to Stanford University educa­
tion professor Linda Darling-Hammond, “The tests we use,
particularly the state standardized tests, are extremely narrow.
Evidence shows that they measure almost exclusively low-level
skills.” A 2012 study from the RAND Corporation backs this
claim, finding that only three to 10 percent of elementary and
middle school students in the United States were administered
tests that assessed deeper learning skills. And even the low-level
skills that the tests do measure can be impacted by how much
sleep the student got the night before the test and whether the
room where the student took the test was too hot or cold.
One thing it seems standardized tests are exceptionally good
at measuring is socioeconomic status. In Class and Schools, Roth-
stein argues that this is because wealthier students have parents
who can spend more time with them and more money on enrich­
ment programs for them. He also writes that wealthy students
also generally have better health and more housing stability
than their lower-income peers, both of which also lead to higher
achievement.
Many of these shortcomings are inherent to these types of
standardized tests. But some problems with the tests admin­
istered to children in many states are easily avoidable. A 2013
investigation by Heather Vogell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitu­
tion found that problems like poorly-worded questions, miss­
ing pages in exam booklets, and malfunctions in answer-sheet
scanners were commonplace in high-stakes standardized tests
administered in states across the country, and that “the vast
majority of states have experienced testing problems—some
repeatedly.”
Deutermann has seen these types of problems in the tests her
son had to take: “[The test questions] are not age appropriate,
they’re riddled with mistakes. There have been mistakes through
the entire test.... There’s no accountability for the test maker.”
Neely-Randall agrees, saying the tests are “developmentally in­
appropriate—and actually I would go so far as to say abusive—to
students.”
20 H A R V A R D PO LITICAL R E V IE W S U M M E R 2015
TOWARD A BETTER ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEM
Given all of these problems with standardized testing, it
seems that the civil rights issue is too much testing, not too little.
Instead of forcing low-income schools to spend millions of dol­
lars and countless hours of class time preparing for and admin­
istering standardized tests that only serve to prove, oftentimes
inaccurately, what we already know about the achievement gap,
we should use those resources to expand programs in the arts
and humanities, to provide incentive pay to attract teachers to
areas where they are needed most, and to decrease class sizes, all
things that could actually make a difference for disadvantaged
students.
This is not to say that America’s accountability system should
be completely dismantled. Politicians and schools can de-em-
phasize testing while still ensuring high achievement. Student
and teacher evaluations can take multiple measures of perfor­
mance into account. The amount of standardized tests students
have to take can be drastically reduced. The fewer standardized
tests that students do take can incorporate more open-ended
questions that force students to think critically and outside the
box
Thirteen years after NCLB’s mandates were first set into
place, the rhetoric used by politicians and pundits is sounding
more and more like that which the same politicians and pundits
used to endorse NCLB. Congress would be ill advised to try to
use high-stakes test-based accountability to narrow the achieve­
ment gap and expect a different result than the aftermath of the
2002 law. It is time to acknowledge that putting an enormous
amount of weight on standardized test scores does not work, and
to move on to other solutions.
Regardless of the outcome of the current debate, grassroots
activists like Deutermann will continue to fight against harm­
ful test-based accountability systems like New York’s. “This is
an epidemic,” she said. “It’s happening everywhere, with all
sorts of kids, from the smartest kids to the kids that struggle the
most, from Republicans to Democrats, from kids in low-income
districts to kids in high-performing districts. It doesn’t matter
where you are, the stories are exactly the same.”
“We may be passive when it comes to all the other things
[corporate reformers] have interjected themselves into,” Deuter­
mann warned, “but when you mess with our kids, that’s when
the claws come out.”
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