Lower price, higher stakes, better testing

In August, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced it will abandon the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) in favor of new tests yet to be developed.

This is great news. I have never believed that a single test tells all that much about a student, that student’s teacher, or even that student’s school. This is particularly true when the stakes riding on the test are low for those taking it. The 10th graders I teach see no connection between the WKCE and their own lives, and for good reason. The only people judged by students’ scores are their teachers; the only thing students get from the test is a day without regular classes.

DPI expects that the new tests will be expensive to develop, noting in its announcement that a new system will cost “significantly more” than the $10 million it spent in 2008-09. I suggest we can save some money, get the information we’re looking for, and give students a stake by being smart with high school assessments. 

What do we want our high school students to be once they’ve been pomp-and-circumstanced out the door? I think we want successful college students, productive workers, and good citizens, and there are existing and meaningful means for testing those.

The ACT, for example, was required of all juniors in the Milwaukee Public Schools for the first time last spring, and it will be again this spring. All high school students in Chicago take it, as well as every high school student in Michigan. Chicago and Michigan use the data from that test to check on their students’ college readiness, and the students use the scores to apply for college. This is a test that’s meaningful to all involved, and the state should follow Milwaukee’s lead and require it for all students.

Not every student will go to college, though. Some will join the military or the workforce right away. Sadly, the federal government no longer offers the Civil Service Exam, having replaced it with more specialized tests depending on what position an applicant wants. That old exam, with its breadth of rigorous questions, would have been perfect for testing students’ readiness to work in the real world.

The state of Wisconsin does require testing of applicants for state positions-though, again, with different tests for different jobs. It should be an easy enough thing for the state to use those already-developed questions in communication and math skills in a civil service-style exam that can, like the ACT, be meaningful: students might qualify for state jobs.

And there’s already a way to test for good citizenship. The federal government recently developed a comprehensive new immigration exam that uses questions about U.S. history and government that everyone ought to know the answer to.

Again, students could find something valuable in that test. The most recent state budget process created some furor when Democrats included a provision to allow undocumented students who graduate from Wisconsin high schools to pay in-state tuition to our university system. A passing score on the immigration test is not the only step in earning U.S. citizenship, of course, but it would certainly demonstrate that graduating undocumented students, not here of their own volition and often learning in a second language, can be good citizens as easily as anyone else.

DPI will still need to develop new, likely expensive, likely computerized assessments for elementary and middle school students. All the same, I encourage DPI to use tests like these for high school-existing, paid-for tests that give students a meaningful stake in the outcome just as much as they give schools information about student achievement.

Jay Bullock is an English teacher at Bay View High School who blogs at folkbum.com. Contact him at mpshallmonitor@gmail.com.