- Standardized tests are causing anxiety and stress for students across the country
- Many students are opting out of taking these tests, with some entire classes boycotting them
- American students are taking an average of 113 standardized tests by graduation
- The pressure of testing is taking a toll on students, with reports of vomiting and crying
- The increase in testing can be traced back to the No Child Left Behind program implemented in the 90s
- The implementation of testing and tying teacher pay to student performance has led to issues and inaccuracies in evaluating teachers
- The quality and effectiveness of these tests is being called into question, with examples of flawed testing in Florida
- The consequences of these tests can have a significant impact on students' futures.

- The speaker expresses frustration with low test scores on the EPCAP and the impact it has on their education opportunities.
- They criticize standardized tests and question who they benefit, highlighting the influence of companies like Pearson.
- Pearson's track record is criticized, including technical glitches, errors in test questions, and questionable grading practices.
- The secrecy surrounding test questions and the lack of transparency is also highlighted.
- The speaker argues that standardized testing has not achieved its goals of narrowing the achievement gap and improving international scores.
- The system is described as enriching companies and lacking accountability.
- The speaker calls for either proving that the system works or accepting that it doesn't and fixing it.

American students face a ridiculous amount of testing. John Oliver explains how standardized tests impact school funding, the achievement gap, how often kids are expected to throw up.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Standardized tests, the fastest way to terrify any child with 5 letters outside of just whispering the word, -"clown." -♪♪ It's currently testing season all over the country, and with that comes the usual flood of anxiety and school-produced videos designed to get kids in the mood.

...say on your face, but it shows that we can do it...

But it gets better because 1 elementary school in Texas even held a test-themed pep rally featuring a monkey mascot.

Ooh, ha-ha, here comes the monkey ♪ ♪ Ooh, ha-ha, it's time to get funky ♪ ♪ Monkey, monkey,

♪ Look, let's all agree there is no scenario in which the words, here comes the monkey, can fail to pump you up.

Just imagine right now I was your surgeon and I said to you, I'm about to put you under, there's about a 20% chance of survival and I have 4 important words for you.

You're gonna be looking forward to that operation.

The point is, those videos and monkey mascots would have you think that testing is amazing, which is why this spate of recent news stories has been so surprising.

In the lower Hudson Valley, many districts reported that more than 25% of their students opted out.

More than 1,700 elementary, middle, and high school students opted out of taking the park test.

There was 5 kids that I was with that took the test.

Like, almost the entire auditorium was filled with kids

Not a single junior showed up to take the Common Core Smarter Balance test this week.

The only other thing an entire class of juniors has ever managed to agree on is that the scarlet letter could be told much simpler with emojis.

But look, is it any wonder that American students are sick of tests.

Between benchmarks, diagnostics, pre- and mock tests, they take a lot of them.

Students are taking between 10 and 20 standardized tests depending on the grade.

A total average of 113 different ones by graduation.

It's approaching the amount that you'd ask your doctor for the morning after you woke up from a one-night stand with Colin Farrell.

And this amount of testing can take a toll.

Teachers have reported kids throwing up, kids crying, especially the younger ones.

In fact, this happens so much that official instructions for test administrators specify what to do if a student vomits on his or her test booklet.

And something is wrong with our system when we just assume a certain number of kids will vomit.

Tests are supposed to be assessments of skills, not a rap battle on 8 Mile Road.

Oh, Eminem, Why did your mom make you spaghetti?

-♪ ♪ -.(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE CONTINUES, THEN

Well, the explosion of testing can be traced back to the 90s, when you probably remember stories like these about the state of public education.

When 40 nations recently took the International Math

and Science Test, American students scored near the bottom.

Especially because you knew the French children weren't even trying.

They tell you nothing of the true nature of the soul.

Bush, on just his third day in office, announced his No Child Left Behind program.

It passed Congress with bipartisan support, because of course it did.

Voting against No Child Left Behind is like voting against No Puppy left unsnuggled.

The program was designed to be data-driven and involve testing children every single year in order to identify and fix failing schools.

An accountability system must have a consequence.

Otherwise, it's not much of an accountability system.

Unfortunately, accountability is 1 of those concepts that everybody's in favor of, but nobody knows how to make work, like synergy or maxi dresses.

No matter who wears them, they look like a poncho fucked a waterfall.

-♪ ♪ -♪ You look like the ghost of Gwyneth Paltrow future.

-♪ ♪ -♪ No Child Left Behind increased the number of federally mandated tests from 6 to 17.

And the fixation on testing was something which our current president seemed to be against as he ran for office.

Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test.

And every year, you should be able to slap 1 parent.

But once this president took office, he didn't get rid of tests.

Instead, he added his own education initiatives, like Race to the Top, which encouraged states to adopt the Common Core, which featured a logo of snails 69-ing.

And again, the intentions here were good, because we do have underperforming schools, and there are major economic and racial disparities in the quality of education children receive.

And anything that can help us narrow those gaps is obviously a good thing.

For instance, many states now tie teacher pay to performance using 1 particular approach.

It's called value-added analysis, rating teachers based on student test scores.

For instance, if a student who ranked in the 60th percentile test higher at the end of the year, the teacher gets a better rating.

If the student falls, the teacher's rating falls.

Okay, well, that explains why many teachers' classroom decorations that used to read, Believe in Yourself, now say, Don't f**k me on this.

And while the idea of tying teacher pay to student improvement sounds great in theory, here's how it can work in practice.

I have 4 students whose predicted scores were literally impossible.

1 of my sixth-grade students had a predicted score of 286.34.

However, the highest a sixth-grade student can earn is 283.

The student did earn a 283, incidentally.

Despite the fact she earned a perfect score, she counted negatively towards my evaluation because she was 3 points below her predicted score.

The only way she could've hit her predicted score was if she answered everything right, wrote a few extra questions of her own, got those right, and then stapled them to the test.

That teacher lives in Florida, which uses this formula to assess teachers.

A formula which looks like the kind of thing that aliens carve into an anti-Semite's cornfield.

And many of these formulas, on which teachers' careers depend, were partly inspired by research, and this is true, that modeled the reproductive trends of livestock.

Basically, we judge the nuance of what happens in the complicated world of a child's mind the same way that we judge this.

Look, I don't know what we did wrong, but your child is going to either pass algebra or birth a healthy calf.

With the stakes this high, the tests had better be good, but there is ample reason to suspect that that is not the case.

Just look at the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT.

A Florida school board member was concerned and a little suspicious when he learned that only 39 percent of his state's 10th graders had performed at or above grade level in reading.

I asked the district at that point to give me the closest thing they could, legally, to the FCAT reading and math test, and I took it.

And I have a couple of master's degrees, and I've been re-elected 4 times, and I teach 39 graduate courses at 6 universities in this country.

Anything else you want to brag about there?

Oh, I also know how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the recorder, and guess who can do 16 non-consecutive push-ups?

If a test fails to reflect ability, there are human consequences.

Because 1 shy Florida eighth grader who had a near perfect score in her advanced language arts class, was asked to leave it last year due to her inexplicably low scores on the FCAT.

And last fall, she told a school board meeting exactly how that felt.

Every year I do good in school, But I get low test...

But I get low test scores on the EPCAP and it feels like a punch in the stomach.

This is unfair and I don't want to lose my opportunity to take my advanced classes or get better education because of this 1 test.

I take back everything I said about wanting to take a standardized test.

At this point, you have to ask yourself, if standardized tests are bad for teachers and bad for kids, who exactly are they good for?

Well, it turns out they're operated by companies like all these.

And let's just focus on the largest 1, Pearson.

As of 2012, they had nearly 40% of the testing market, almost triple their nearest competitor.

And if you've never heard of them, then congratulations.

But, just mention their name to any parent or teacher in a state they operate in, and you see what happens.

Because Pearson are the educational equivalent of Time Warner Cable.

Either you've never had an interaction with them and don't care, or they have ruined your fucking life.

Pearson have a shocking amount of influence over America's schools.

So much so, that at this point, a hypothetical girl could take Pearson tests from kindergarten through at least eighth grade.

Tests, by the way, that she studied for using Pearson curriculum and textbooks taught to her by teachers who were certified by their own Pearson test.

If at some point she was tested for a learning disability, like ADHD, that's also a Pearson test.

And if she eventually got sick of Pearson and dropped out, well, she'd have to take the GED, which is now, guess what, also a Pearson test.

In fact, the only test they have no hand in is the HPV test you might take in college, and I can only assume that they'll get on that as soon as they see this fucking show.

♪ Pearson has enjoyed spectacular growth and profits, And yet, their track record is littered with complaints concerning technical glitches, slow grading, and even the contents of their tests.

Take what happened in New York just a few years ago.

Almost 30 different test questions have now been declared invalid because they're confusing or have outright errors.

They'd already pulled 6 questions from an English exam related to a bizarre passage about a talking pineapple.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a DreamWorks executive talking to a CGI animator, tell me more about this talking pineapple.

Students had to answer questions about the story, which they say goes like this.

Other animals figure the fruit has a trick up its sleeve, but the hare wins and the animals eat the pineapple.

It ends with the moral, pineapples don't have sleeves.

I was really confused because, I expected a lot more from them.

That article about the pineapple in the hair was stupid and absurd.

Yeah, she's not wrong about that, because we looked up that test section, and we couldn't work out all the answers.

That pineapple item doesn't remotely work as a test question, it barely works as a Doors lyric.

It's not just Pearson's questions that are a problem, It's how they check the answers.

The company posted this ad to Craigslist.

Pearson chooses test graders the same way that you'd look for a mattress full of bed bugs or a no-strings-attached handjob.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And to be clear here, just to be clear, this is not just a Pearson problem.

Across the whole testing industry, you can find former graders who will tell you horror stories.

A short answer every 5 seconds, every 10 seconds.

That is not an acceptable answer from a person who may be responsible for the future of your child.

It's barely acceptable from the manufacturers of American Girl dolls.

Oh, we make dolls for a hundred bucks that kids can't play with in case they get them dirty.

And as another scorer points out, sometimes grades are given out not based on merit, but on quota.

I was told when I was beginning a project that last year, you know, there were a certain amount of twos, a certain amount of threes, a certain amount of fours.

If that's not similar, they will tell you, we're scoring too many threes, we're scoring too many fours.

And they'll say, you have to learn to see more papers as a 3, you have to learn to see more papers as a 4.

But that makes no sense if the content of what you're looking at has not changed.

That's like telling a baseball umpire, hey, we've got a problem with batting averages.

You need to see more home runs as strikeouts, and more strikeouts as doubles.

And I would love to show you more questions from these tests, but unfortunately, that's not only difficult, it's often illegal.

Because both states and companies have fought to keep test questions secret by having teachers and students sign statements like, I will not use or discuss the content of secure test materials.

And while they'll say that this is to protect against cheating, it does seem odd that even if you see something wrong on a test, you can't tell anyone.

Standardized tests basically enforce the rule that all subway riders instinctively obey.

If you see something, keep it the fuck to yourself.

We've all seen someone vomit in a purse before.

Look, look, we've had more than a decade of standardized testing now, and maybe it's time to put the test to the test.

The original goal was to narrow the achievement gap and boost our scores relative to the rest of the world.

Well, a 2013 study found no support for the idea that No Child Left Behind narrowed the achievement gap, and our scores on the international tests have not only failed to rise, they're slightly down.

And I do not want to hear what that French kid thinks of those results.

Oh, all this time and all this money, and your race to the top has been, how you say, a meandering jog on a treadmill.

--WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE for a little of what both presidents asked for when selling their reforms.

Right, so let's look at that, because as far as I can see, this is a system which has enriched multiple companies, and that pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples, and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency that Brad Pitt had for Fight Club.

the other companies, and all the lawmakers who have supported this system, the true test is going to be either convincing everyone it works, or accepting it doesn't work and fixing it.

Because at the risk of sounding like a standardized test scorer, your numbers are not good.

And if it seems unfair to have your fates riding on a complicated metric that fails to take institutional factors into account and might not even tell the whole story, well, you're not wrong about that.

And if all this pressure to increase your numbers is making you feel nauseous, like you might vomit at any second, then don't worry.


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Standardized tests, the fastest way to terrify any child with 5 letters outside of just whispering the word, -"clown." -♪♪ It's currently testing season all over the country, and with that comes the usual flood of anxiety and school-produced videos designed to get kids in the mood. -♪

Speaker 1: Can't read my, can't read my...

Speaker 0: ♪ -♪

Speaker 1: I know you can't hear my test...

Speaker 0: ♪

Speaker 1: ...say on your face, but it shows that we can do it... -♪ Hey! We can do it! And it's crazy! But I'm determined!

So test me, maybe!

Speaker 2: What does the test say? Get your number 2 pencils out! Your number 2 pencils out! Get your number 2 pencils out! What does the test say?

Speaker 3: Get your number 2 pencils out! Get your number 2 pencils out! Look, standardized tests

Speaker 0: look like amazing fun. I wish I could take 1 right now. Bring me a pencil. A number 2, please! But it gets better because 1 elementary school in Texas even held a test-themed pep rally featuring a monkey mascot.

♪ Ooh, ha-ha,

Speaker 2: it's time to get funky

Speaker 0: ♪ ♪

Speaker 2: Ooh, ha-ha, here comes the monkey ♪ ♪ Ooh, ha-ha, it's time to get funky ♪ ♪ Monkey, monkey,

Speaker 1: monkey, monkey

Speaker 0: ♪ Look, let's all agree there is no scenario in which the words, here comes the monkey, can fail to pump you up. Just imagine right now I was your surgeon and I said to you, I'm about to put you under, there's about a 20% chance of survival and I have 4 important words for you. Here comes the monkey. -♪ You're gonna be looking... -♪

Speaker 3: You're gonna be looking forward to that operation. It's gonna be a fun time. You see? You love it. The point is,

Speaker 0: the point is, you proved my point. The point is, those videos and monkey mascots would have you think that testing is amazing, which is why this spate of recent news stories has been so surprising.

Speaker 2: In the lower Hudson Valley, many districts reported that more than 25% of their students opted out.

Speaker 4: More than 1,700 elementary, middle, and high school students opted out of taking the park test.

Speaker 5: There was 5 kids that I was with that took the test. Yeah. Like, almost the entire auditorium was filled with kids

Speaker 4: that didn't take it. Not a single junior showed up to take the Common Core Smarter Balance test this week.

Speaker 0: Wow. The entire class boycotted the test. The only other thing an entire class of juniors has ever managed to agree on is that the scarlet letter could be told much simpler with emojis. Yeah, we get it. We get it.

Red lady, finger finger, devil, baby.

Speaker 3: We've all read the book. It's a good story.

Speaker 0: But look, is it any wonder that American students are sick of tests. Between benchmarks, diagnostics, pre- and mock tests, they take a lot of them.

Speaker 4: Students are taking between 10 and 20 standardized tests depending on the grade. A total average of 113 different ones by graduation.

Speaker 0: 113 is a lot of tests. It's approaching the amount that you'd ask your doctor for the morning after you woke up from a one-night stand with Colin Farrell. Just give me all of them twice. And this amount of testing can take a toll.

Speaker 4: Teachers have reported kids throwing up, kids crying, especially the younger ones. And it's the pressure.

Speaker 0: That's true. In fact, this happens so much that official instructions for test administrators specify what to do if a student vomits on his or her test booklet. And something is wrong with our system when we just assume a certain number of kids will vomit. Tests are supposed to be assessments of skills, not a rap battle on 8 Mile Road. Oh, Eminem, Why did your mom make you spaghetti?

She knew tonight was rap battle night. -♪ ♪ -.(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE CONTINUES, THEN

Speaker 3: STOPS ABRUPTLY So, how

Speaker 0: did we get here? Well, the explosion of testing can be traced back to the 90s, when you probably remember stories like these about the state of public education.

Speaker 4: When 40 nations recently took the International Math

Speaker 6: and Science Test, American students scored near the bottom.

Speaker 0: And that must have hurt. Especially because you knew the French children weren't even trying. Go on, play with your silly numbers. They tell you nothing of the true nature of the soul. I weep for you.

In response to statistics like that,

Speaker 3: in response to those kind of

Speaker 0: statistics, President George W. Bush, on just his third day in office, announced his No Child Left Behind program. It passed Congress with bipartisan support, because of course it did. Voting against No Child Left Behind is like voting against No Puppy left unsnuggled. What monster would do that?

His name is Patches, and he needs love! The program was designed to be data-driven and involve testing children every single year in order to identify and fix failing schools.

Speaker 7: An accountability system must have a consequence. Otherwise, it's not much of an accountability system.

Speaker 0: It's hard to argue with any of that. Unfortunately, accountability is 1 of those concepts that everybody's in favor of, but nobody knows how to make work, like synergy or maxi dresses. No matter who wears them, they look like a poncho fucked a waterfall. -♪ ♪ -♪ You look like the ghost of Gwyneth Paltrow future. I only haunt brunch.

Goo. -♪ ♪ -♪ No Child Left Behind increased the number of federally mandated tests from 6 to 17. And the fixation on testing was something which our current president seemed to be against as he ran for office.

Speaker 8: Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test. We know that's not true.

Speaker 0: Wow. That man knew how to pander to teachers.

Speaker 3: And you know what else? There should be pool tables

Speaker 0: in the teacher's lounge. And every year, you should be able to slap 1 parent. Vote for

Speaker 3: me, I'm out of here. I'm out of here. Vote... Vote for me.

Speaker 0: But once this president took office, he didn't get rid of tests. Instead, he added his own education initiatives, like Race to the Top, which encouraged states to adopt the Common Core, which featured a logo of snails 69-ing. And again, the intentions here were good, because we do have underperforming schools, and there are major economic and racial disparities in the quality of education children receive. And anything that can help us narrow those gaps is obviously a good thing. The problem has been the implementation.

For instance, many states now tie teacher pay to performance using 1 particular approach.

Speaker 9: It's called value-added analysis, rating teachers based on student test scores. For instance, if a student who ranked in the 60th percentile test higher at the end of the year, the teacher gets a better rating. If the student falls, the teacher's rating falls.

Speaker 0: Okay, well, that explains why many teachers' classroom decorations that used to read, Believe in Yourself, now say, Don't f**k me on this. Don't f**k with. And while the idea of tying teacher pay to student improvement sounds great in theory, here's how it can work in practice.

Speaker 10: I have 4 students whose predicted scores were literally impossible. 1 of my sixth-grade students had a predicted score of 286.34. However, the highest a sixth-grade student can earn is 283. The student did earn a 283, incidentally. Despite the fact she earned a perfect score, she counted negatively towards my evaluation because she was 3 points below her predicted score.

Speaker 0: That is ridiculous. The only way she could've hit her predicted score was if she answered everything right, wrote a few extra questions of her own, got those right, and then stapled them to the test. That teacher lives in Florida, which uses this formula to assess teachers. A formula which looks like the kind of thing that aliens carve into an anti-Semite's cornfield. And...

And many of these formulas, on which teachers' careers depend, were partly inspired by research, and this is true, that modeled the reproductive trends of livestock. Basically, we judge the nuance of what happens in the complicated world of a child's mind the same way that we judge this. Look, I don't know what we did wrong, but your child is going to either pass algebra or birth a healthy calf.

Speaker 3: I don't know. Flip a coin.

Speaker 0: With the stakes this high, the tests had better be good, but there is ample reason to suspect that that is not the case. Just look at the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. A Florida school board member was concerned and a little suspicious when he learned that only 39 percent of his state's 10th graders had performed at or above grade level in reading. So he had an idea.

Speaker 11: I asked the district at that point to give me the closest thing they could, legally, to the FCAT reading and math test, and I took it. That test labeled me as a poor reader. And I have a couple of master's degrees, and I've been re-elected 4 times, and I teach 39 graduate courses at 6 universities in this country.

Speaker 0: Okay, okay, okay. We get it. The test sucks. Anything else you want to brag about there? Oh, I also know how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the recorder, and guess who can do 16 non-consecutive push-ups?

This fucking guy. But look, he does have a point. He does have a point. If a test fails to reflect ability, there are human consequences. Because 1 shy Florida eighth grader who had a near perfect score in her advanced language arts class, was asked to leave it last year due to her inexplicably low scores on the FCAT.

And last fall, she told a school board meeting exactly how that felt.

Speaker 5: Every year I do good in school, But I get low test... But I get low test scores on the EPCAP and it feels like a punch in the stomach. This is unfair and I don't want to lose my opportunity to take my advanced classes or get better education because of this 1 test.

Speaker 0: That is just awful. I take back everything I said about wanting to take a standardized test. In fact, you know what? Bring out the monkey.

Speaker 2: Bring out the monkey. No, no, no. No, no. No, no.

Speaker 3: Turn off his music. Turn off his... Do not applaud him. What the f*** is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?

You made that little girl cry. Think about what you've done. Go... No, no, no. Don't you...

Don't you dance it off. You go

Speaker 0: and think about what you've done. Aw. Shame on you.

Speaker 3: Shame on you. Look...

Speaker 0: At this point, you have to ask yourself, if standardized tests are bad for teachers and bad for kids, who exactly are they good for? Well, it turns out they're operated by companies like all these. And let's just focus on the largest 1, Pearson. As of 2012, they had nearly 40% of the testing market, almost triple their nearest competitor. And if you've never heard of them, then congratulations.

But, just mention their name to any parent or teacher in a state they operate in, and you see what happens. Because Pearson are the educational equivalent of Time Warner Cable. Either you've never had an interaction with them and don't care, or they have ruined your fucking life. Pearson have a shocking amount of influence over America's schools. So much so, that at this point, a hypothetical girl could take Pearson tests from kindergarten through at least eighth grade.

Tests, by the way, that she studied for using Pearson curriculum and textbooks taught to her by teachers who were certified by their own Pearson test. If at some point she was tested for a learning disability, like ADHD, that's also a Pearson test. And if she eventually got sick of Pearson and dropped out, well, she'd have to take the GED, which is now, guess what, also a Pearson test. In fact, the only test they have no hand in is the HPV test you might take in college, and I can only assume that they'll get on that as soon as they see this fucking show. -♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Speaker 0: ♪ Pearson has enjoyed spectacular growth and profits, And yet, their track record is littered with complaints concerning technical glitches, slow grading, and even the contents of their tests. Take what happened in New York just a few years ago.

Speaker 12: Almost 30 different test questions have now been declared invalid because they're confusing or have outright errors. They'd already pulled 6 questions from an English exam related to a bizarre passage about a talking pineapple.

Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ A talking pineapple? Well, at the risk of sounding like a DreamWorks executive talking to a CGI animator, tell me more about this talking pineapple.

Speaker 12: Students had to answer questions about the story, which they say goes like this. A pineapple challenges a hare to a race. Other animals figure the fruit has a trick up its sleeve, but the hare wins and the animals eat the pineapple. It ends with the moral, pineapples don't have sleeves.

Speaker 5: I was really confused because, I expected a lot more from them. That article about the pineapple in the hair was stupid and absurd.

Speaker 0: Yeah, she's not wrong about that, because we looked up that test section, and we couldn't work out all the answers. That pineapple item doesn't remotely work as a test question, it barely works as a Doors lyric. But... It's... It's not just Pearson's questions that are a problem, It's how they check the answers.

Speaker 2: The company posted this ad to Craigslist. It's to find people to grade the exams.

Speaker 0: Craigslist. They look for scorers on Craigslist. Pearson chooses test graders the same way that you'd look for a mattress full of bed bugs or a no-strings-attached handjob. -♪ ♪ -♪ And to be clear here, just to be clear, this is not just a Pearson problem. Across the whole testing industry, you can find former graders who will tell you horror stories.

Speaker 13: We looked at an essay every 2 minutes. A short answer every 5 seconds, every 10 seconds. We don't understand your kids. We don't understand anyone's kids.

Speaker 0: That is not an acceptable answer from a person who may be responsible for the future of your child. It's barely acceptable from the manufacturers of American Girl dolls. Oh, we make dolls for a hundred bucks that kids can't play with in case they get them dirty. We don't understand your kids. We don't understand anyone's kids.

And as another scorer points out, sometimes grades are given out not based on merit, but on quota.

Speaker 14: I was told when I was beginning a project that last year, you know, there were a certain amount of twos, a certain amount of threes, a certain amount of fours. We expect that to be similar this year. If that's not similar, they will tell you, we're scoring too many threes, we're scoring too many fours. And they'll say, you have to learn to see more papers as a 3, you have to learn to see more papers as a 4.

Speaker 0: But that makes no sense if the content of what you're looking at has not changed. That's like telling a baseball umpire, hey, we've got a problem with batting averages. You need to see more home runs as strikeouts, and more strikeouts as doubles. Do it now. And I would love to show you more questions from these tests, but unfortunately, that's not only difficult, it's often illegal.

Because both states and companies have fought to keep test questions secret by having teachers and students sign statements like, I will not use or discuss the content of secure test materials. And while they'll say that this is to protect against cheating, it does seem odd that even if you see something wrong on a test, you can't tell anyone. Standardized tests basically enforce the rule that all subway riders instinctively obey. If you see something, keep it the fuck to yourself. We've all seen someone vomit in a purse before.

Leave it! Focus ahead and leave it! Bury it! -... Look, look, we've had more than a decade of standardized testing now, and maybe it's time to put the test to the test.

The original goal was to narrow the achievement gap and boost our scores relative to the rest of the world. Well, a 2013 study found no support for the idea that No Child Left Behind narrowed the achievement gap, and our scores on the international tests have not only failed to rise, they're slightly down. And I do not want to hear what that French kid thinks of those results. Oh, all this time and all this money, and your race to the top has been, how you say, a meandering jog on a treadmill. --Yeah.

--But... --All of this... All of this calls... --WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE for a little of what both presidents asked for when selling their reforms.

Speaker 8: Higher standards are the right goal. Accountability is the right goal.

Speaker 7: An accountability system must have a consequence. Otherwise, it's not much of an accountability system.

Speaker 0: Right, so let's look at that, because as far as I can see, this is a system which has enriched multiple companies, and that pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples, and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency that Brad Pitt had for Fight Club.

Speaker 3: So... So for Pearson,

Speaker 0: the other companies, and all the lawmakers who have supported this system, the true test is going to be either convincing everyone it works, or accepting it doesn't work and fixing it. Because at the risk of sounding like a standardized test scorer, your numbers are not good. And if it seems unfair to have your fates riding on a complicated metric that fails to take institutional factors into account and might not even tell the whole story, well, you're not wrong about that. But you do not get to complain about it. And if all this pressure to increase your numbers is making you feel nauseous, like you might vomit at any second, then don't worry.

I've got 4 words for you that'll make

Speaker 1: You

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Standardized Testing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)