In the age of big-data driven targeted marketing, collecting or buying data sets from third parties has become a burdensome expense for marketers. Facebook and Google collect consumer preference data by providing many free services in return. Educational testing companies, however, have come up with a billion-dollar idea where they get to collect data on kids and also get paid for it.
They pull off this near-impossible trick by contributing substantially to the political campaigns of those who decide about our kids’ education and by hiring state education commissioners and other influential bureaucrats to plum corporate jobs. The fear is that in the future, the testing companies will use this performance data about individual students to sell test preparation products by targeting our kids in a way that makes them feel inadequate and insecure.
I am not against targeted marketing as long as it benefits the students. But standardized tests, particularly PARCC, that rely mostly on multiple-choice questions and tests only on those tiny set of possible questions that can be answered in less than one minute, harm our children.
As a result, after incurring all the costs, paying millions of dollars to testing companies, spending millions more on computers to conduct these tests, losing multiple days of school instruction time, forfeiting the privacy of our kids’ performance, and making them a target of useless marketing, what we will get in return is something that will harm our kids’ critical thinking abilities and take the focus of our schools in the wrong direction.
Take a step back and think about your own job and personal life. The success in our careers and happiness in personal life comes from endeavors that take weeks and months, not minutes. Most real-life professional problems are not well-defined like a multiple choice question. In real life it is we who define and prioritize the problems ourselves, then the solutions require us to engage in open-ended research, discussions with experts and colleagues, thinking critically and sometimes analyzing for days and months. And almost always the final solution is not the ideal one but calls for a compromise and for us to choose the least bad among numerous inadequate solutions.
These solutions have to be presented to our teammates or family members for their review. It takes a lot of patient communication to fine-tune before other people can buy into it. The only rare instances in our life where we get to pick among well-defined choices within a minute is while ordering a coffee at Starbucks or deciding about the toppings when ordering pizza.
In almost 20 years of my own professional life I have felt that students who come out of a system that relies excessively on standardized time-bound testing are handicapped when it comes to performing in real life. They have less patience to conceptualize long-term goals and to break them into sequential projects, they lose focus and motivation when a problem requires open-ended research or needs analysis beyond a short time-frame, they have poor communication skills, and in general lack sympathy to their teammates’ views.
An education system that caters to the results of PARCC-type testing produces workers who are capable only of following orders and clear directions and incapable of stepping up to higher responsibilities. Such a system cannot produce managers, leaders or entrepreneurs.
We should test our kids, but not on the answers that they can give in under one minute, but rather on the quality of questions they ask and the time and effort they are ready to put into research. No PARCC-type tests can measure these virtues in our children. These can only be measured by personal interaction of teachers over the course of the school year and by the feedback of the parents during parent-teacher interactions.
Alok Sharma
Davenport Drive, West Windsor
