High Stakes Testing Quotes

There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.

High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to “teach to the test,” or worse, cheat.

Anyone who truly cares about children must be repelled by the insistence on ranking them, rating them, and labeling them. Whatever the tests measure is not the sum and substance of any child. The tests do not measure character, spirit, heart, soul, potential. When overused and misused, when attached to high stakes, the tests stifle the very creativity and ingenuity that our society needs most. Creativity and ingenuity stubbornly resist standardization. Tests should be used sparingly to help students and teachers, not to allocate rewards and punishments and not to label children and adults by their scores.

Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic. 　　Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed. What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’ 　　Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen: 　　First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort. 　　Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.) 　　Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure. 　　  　　What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’ 　　What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

In the high-stakes testing culture of modern education, schools are allowing grades and performance data to undercut real and meaningful learning. Study after study has found that students—from elementary school to graduate school and across multiple cultures—demonstrate less interest in learning as a result of being graded. Feedback in the form of grades is the ultimate restraint: The grade can’t be changed, the lesson can’t be relearned, and numbers and letters don’t spell out a way forward. Worse, teachers and students get stuck on the wheel of relentless grading, diminished interest in learning, poor outcomes, more tests and grades—the cycle quickly turns vicious. But the real victim is the knowledge that students might have otherwise gained had feedback amounted to more than a rating.

Finnish education appears paradoxical to outside observers because it seems to break a lot of the rules. In Finland, “less is more.” Children don’t start academics1 until the year they turn seven. They have a lot of recess (ten to fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, even through high school), shorter school hours than we do in the United States (Finnish children spend nearly three hundred fewer hours2 in elementary school per year than Americans), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, few private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests. Yet over the past decade, Finland has consistently performed at the top on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to fifteen-year-olds in nations around the world. While American children3 usually hover around the middle of the pack on this test, Finland’s excel.

The reformers believe that scores will go up if it is easy to fire teachers and if unions are weakened. But is this true? No. The only test scores that can be used comparatively are those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, because it is a no-stakes test. No one knows who will take it, no one knows what will be on the test, no student takes the full test, and the results are not reported for individuals or for schools. There is no way to prepare for NAEP, so there is no test prep. There are no rewards or punishments attached to it, so there is no reason to cheat, to teach to the test, or to game the system. So, let’s examine the issues at hand using NAEP scores as a measure. The states that consistently have the highest test scores are Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Consistently ranking at the bottom are states in the South and the District of Columbia. The highest-ranking states have strong teachers’ unions and until recently had strong tenure protections for teachers. The lowest-ranking states do not have strong teachers’ unions, and their teachers have few or no job protections. There seems to be no correlation between having a strong union and having low test scores; if anything, it appears that the states with the strongest unions have the highest test scores. The lowest-performing states have one thing in common, and that is high poverty. The District of Columbia has a strong union and high poverty; it also has intense racial isolation in its schools. It has very low test scores. Most of the cities that rank at the very bottom on NAEP have teachers’ unions, and they have two things in common: high poverty and racial isolation.

The stakes are so high. Our boys deserve meaningful relationships, the freedom to pursue what interests and challenges them, a feeling of belonging and social connection to others, and a sense that they’re contributing to something larger than themselves.

High Stakes Like Blue Bottle Coffee, you’re facing a big problem and the solution will require a lot of time and money. It’s as if you’re the captain of a ship. A sprint is your chance to check the navigation charts and steer in the right direction before going full steam ahead. Not Enough Time You’re up against a deadline, like Savioke rushing to get their robot ready for the hotel pilot. You need good solutions, fast. As the name suggests, a sprint is built for speed. Just Plain Stuck Some important projects are hard to start. Others lose momentum along the way. In these situations, a sprint can be a booster rocket: a fresh approach to problem solving that helps you escape

Dr. Fauci had a strong stake in the controversy. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI. Dr. Fauci’s career depended on the universal belief that HIV alone causes AIDS. The dispute, for him, was existential. Led by Dr. Fauci’s college of cardinals, the medical cartel—the emerging highly profitable drug, research, testing and nonprofit charitable HIV-AIDS enterprise—attacked Duesberg and the other dissidents as “flat-earthers”25 and Holocaust-type “denialists,”26 or, in Dr. Fauci’s estimation, murderers

many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools.

They were developing their basic intuition, a necessary if time-consuming process. They’d design something, then test it, then design and test something else, relying on a sort of a guess-and-check algorithm.

It’s a little early for you to have staked out such lush territory in the high ground,” she says irritably. All of this is making her feel a merciless roster of feelings, a series of miniature tests of her moral character, most of which she has, judging by the way Mark is looking at her, failed. But

In 1991, a college sophomore studying music in the American Midwest made the mistake of selling some drugs to the wrong person. Until then, he hadn’t done much more than smoke pot and sell some of it to his friends. Petty vandalism at his high school was as high stakes as his criminal career had been. Then, as these things tend to go when you’re just 18 years old, he tried to push the envelope and test his boundaries. He started experimenting with hard drugs like LSD. But he was naive, and the brashness of youth got the best of him. He sold some of that LSD outside his circle—to an undercover policeman. And as if his luck couldn’t get worse, like a scene out of a TV movie of the week, the judge, under pressure to make an example out of this young man, sentenced him to 6 to 25 years in prison. It’s a faceless, timeless story that transcends race, class, and region. A young kid makes a mistake that forever changes their lives and their family’s lives as well. We are all too familiar with how stories like this usually end: The kid spends their most impressionable years behind bars and comes out worse than when they went in. Life on the outside is too difficult to contend with; habits learned on the inside are too difficult to shed. They reoffend; their crimes escalate. The cycle continues. This story, however, is a little different. Because this young man didn’t go back to jail. In fact, after being released in less than 5 years on good behavior, he went on to become one of the best jazz violinists in the world. He left prison with a fire lit underneath him—to practice, to repent, to humble himself, to hustle, and to do whatever it took to make something of his life. No task was too small, no gig was too tiny, no potential fan was too disinterested for him not to give it everything he had. And he did. The story is a little different for another reason, too. That young man’s name is Christian Howes. He is my older brother.

You can run a sprint anytime you’re not sure what to do, or struggling to get started, or dealing with a high-stakes decision. The best sprints are used to solve important problems, so we encourage you to pick a big fight. Throughout

Particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing.

Nevertheless, in the field of second and foreign language teaching, behaviorist pedagogy—i.e., direct instruction in various forms—maintains a large following, which seems to grow ever larger in this era of high-stakes testing. The connection is obvious. When educators’ evaluations, pay, promotions, and job security depend on “metrics” of student performance, there is a natural tendency to teach to the test. Hence the proliferation of test-prep materials, paint-by-numbers teaching guides, and commercial learning systems, inevitably advertised as “research-based” and “aligned to the Common Core.

The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns “high-stakes” testing. The stakes are considered high because instead of simply testing students to measure their progress, schools are increasingly held accountable for the results.

The over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators’ efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy,” the organization states.5

We’re reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five.

Hence [through No Child Left Behind] the state has been given power...to fire all teachers and principles. So here we have an unusual case in which the students are engaged in the performances, but the high stakes have been displaced onto the teachers who are preparing their charges for the exams.

The same research suggests that increasing the stress on schools, such as through high-stakes testing, is ill advised. Indeed, researchers have shown that stress increases what Irving Janis called “groupthink.

Thanks to the nation's testing mania (which I like to call 'No Child Left Untested' rather than 'No Child Left Behind'), children are being barraged with a nonstop volley of standardized tests. From kindergarten to graduate school, students are subjected to an unprecedented number of high-stakes tests

...I would much rather my kids leave my class with the strength of character and courage to fight racism when they find it, than have memorized some facts about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I’m not saying you can’t have both, I’m just pointing out that only one of those things will be measured on the test — and it isn’t the most important one.

First, national standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed by the curriculum and expected by the standards. This system fails to expose students to content and skills in other areas. As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow spectrum of talents. But especially in today's society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered. Innovation and creativity come from cross-fertilization across different disciplines. A narrow educational experience hardly provides children opportunities to examine an issue from multiple disciplines.

How Do We Raise Our Test Scores? This is the most pervasive misguided (and misguiding) question. While high-stakes testing is an undeniable reality in public education, this fatally flawed initial question leads to the wrong answers for achieving deep levels of student learning.

In Spain, Torquemada personally sent 10,220 persons to the stake. . . . Counting those killed for other heresies, the persecutions were responsible for reducing the population of Spain from twenty million to six million in two hundred years … While the well-known estimate of the total death-toll, from Roman times onward, of nine million is probably somewhat too high, it can safely be said that more persons were put to death than were killed in all the European wars fought up to 1914.

In the field of biology, “superbugs” evolve when a bacterium, fungus, or virus is put in a low-stakes setting where it can both thrive and test itself against a panoply of our best defenses (like antibiotics). Hospitals present one such setting in that they serve as gathering points for already-infected individuals (many of whom are immunocompromised, making them “easy mode” for viruses, fungi, and bacteria) and are packed with antivirals, antifungal, and antibiotic medications. . . . Our modern social landscape has created a similar environment, enabling cultural viruses to evolve. These viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently and must parasitize healthy cultural ecosystems, rewriting healthy cultures' internal machinery to carry out their life cycles.

Los exámenes de altas consecuencias o de alto impacto (high-stakes tests en inglés) son aquellas pruebas o exámenes que tienen consecuencias serias e importantes para los individuos que los toman,

That is the second step in the innovation cycle at Netflix: “For a big idea, test it out.” When the stakes are high, see if you can conduct an experiment that will allow you to put your idea to the test.

We and our children still must answer to the pressures beyond our own four walls: the hypercompetitive college applications, the mountains of state-mandated curricula, the high-stakes standardized tests and rigid AP exams, the schedules set by club leaders and coaches, the constant well-meaning questions (“Where are you thinking of going to college?”). The crisis our children face calls for a whole movement—a radically altered vision for childhood and education and a groundswell of cultural change. Unless we build that, we’ll just be erecting little storm shelters in a hurricane.

Gloria Ladson-Billings says that successful teachers of low-income, culturally diverse children know that their students are "school dependent." What she means is that while children from more privileged backgrounds can manage to perform well in school and on high-stakes tests in spite of poor teachers, children who are not a part of the mainstream are dependent upon schools to teach them whatever they need to know to be successful.

The picture of the Pythia breathing in vapors from a chasm below her tripod has always been the dominant model for understanding how the oracle at Delphi functioned. To such an extent that finding the mechanism of the vapors was originally regarded as the litmus test for successful archaeological investigation at Delphi. The original excavators of the site were extremely disappointed not to find a chasm below the temple—they felt almost cheated by the “deception” of the literary sources. The stakes were understandably high: at the time of Delphi’s excavation in the 1890s, interest in the oracle, and in psychic research more generally, could not have been stronger. In 1891 the burlesque opera Apollo, or The Oracle at Delphi played to great acclaim on Broadway. In the same year, John Collier painted his famous Priestess of Delphi in which a sensual priestess breathes in vapors from her tripod over a chasm (see plate 4), and the Society of Psychical Research was started by Cambridge academics and published its first volume examining the oracle at Delphi. In the wake of the disappointing excavations, thus, there was a feeling that the ancient sources had lied. The scholar A. P. Oppé in 1904 in the Journal of Hellenic Studies argued that the entire practice at Delphi was a farce, a sham, put on by the priests of Apollo, tricking the ancient world. Others sought different explanations for the Pythia’s madness: they focused on the laurel leaves, and suggested the Pythia had been high from eating laurel. One German scholar, Professor Oesterreich, even ate laurel leaves to test the theory, remarking disappointedly that he felt no different. Others opined that the answer relied not in some form of drug, but in psychology. Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell argued in the 1950s that the Pythia, in the heat of the moment after so much preparation on the particular day of consultation, and after so many years perhaps involved with the temple as one of the women guarding the sacred flame, would have found herself in an emotionally intense relationship with the god, and could easily have fallen victim to self-induced hypnosis. More recently, scholars have employed a series of anthropological approaches to understand belief in spirit possession, and applied these to how the Pythia may have functioned.

High Stakes

Humanity is fighting a war,” she said to an unseen audience. “It is a global war—a war that has raged since our ancestors took their first steps. It may never end. This war has no borders, no treaties, no ceasefire. Our enemy lives among us. It is invisible, immortal, always adapting—and testing our defenses for weakness. “It strikes when we least expect it. It kills and maims indiscriminately. It will attack any person, of any nation, race, or religion. Our immortal enemy is in this room. It is inside you. And me. That enemy is the pathogens that each and every one of us carries. “For the most part, we live in an uncomfortable equilibrium with bacteria and viruses, both those inside of us and those outside, in the natural world. But every now and then, the war reignites. An old pathogen, long dormant, returns. A new mutation emerges. Those events are the epidemics and pandemics we confront. They are the battles we fight. “Success for humanity means winning every battle. The stakes are high. Around the world, disease is the one enemy that unites every person of every race and nationality. When a pandemic occurs, we come together in a single, species-wide cause. “In the history of our battle against pandemics, there have been lulls and wildfires, peaks and valleys. It is the wildfires we know well; they are committed to history. They are the times when we lost the battle. They are the dark years when the human race died en masse. When our population shrank. When we cowered and waited.

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