Let's Use Testing to Help Our Students.

Education today, both intellectual and physical, is increasingly filled with statistics. No doubt this trend is designed to pressure school districts, principals, and teachers to be more productive. And test scores measure production. But in reality "Do test scores truly reflect the quality of our school programs?" Based on my 35 years of teaching, I have yet to find even one teacher who believes that the quality of his or her program is best measured by test results. It is painfully obvious to most teachers that education is not about easily measured outcomes. Education is working with people who come into classes with vastly different sets of skills and knowledge. Good teachers take students at their current entry level and move them forward.

A few questions to consider:

1. Is the quality of health care based on the patient's survival rate? If so, maybe doctors should only take care of healthy patients, or at least those who will most likely make a full recovery. Survival rate is not a very good measurement of quality.
2. Is good coaching in sports based on the team's win-loss record? If so, coaches would be smart to quit before they have to work with incoming less skilled athletes. Ever notice how a coach with a winning record quickly turns to losing when the quality of her players falls? Coaches have little control over winning and losing.
3. If a private school or college wants to keep its academic reputation what's the likelihood of it taking chances on trying to improve the academic performance of lesser skilled students? If you want the best scores you should pick the best students.

I'm puzzled and frustrated by this trend toward relying on test scores to evaluate schools and classrooms. Certainly one reason is political. School boards and administrators need to justify their programs. The simplest way is through testing. Other than testing, it would be very complicated to try to figure out what works and what doesn't. But what does testing really prove? Doesn't it depend on the test given, who is taking it, and who is administering the test?

In New York State, 4th and 8th graders recently showed tremendous improvement on the New York State Math test. However, the national test, considered the gold standard in testing, showed almost no gains at all. So were the improvements because the New York State test was too easy? Why didn't the same students do well on the national test? What exactly did we learn as a result of these tests? And perhaps just as importantly, what are we going to do now?

Physical Education is beginning to follow in classroom education's footsteps. We are constantly looking for ways to justify our existence. You hear more and more about testing and assessment as the way to prove our programs worthwhile. Unfortunately, I fear that this trend will have the opposite effect. More and more students will be turned off of physical education. The skilled and fit will do well, but they would do well with or without us. The ones who really need us, the less physically gifted, the less fit, and the least coordinated, will struggle through our programs as they used to struggle through all those competitive programs that emphasized team sports over individual activities.

Physical educators can make a difference. But it won't always be shown by statistics on national, state, school district, or even classroom quantitative tests. The value of these tests is to help our students improve their fitness, not to track the success of our individual programs. We are special. Our programs must provide students with the opportunity to grow both physically and mentally. We must work with all students no matter what abilities they come to us with.

What today's physical educators need to do is to more effectively communicate with parents and school administrators. We need to demonstrate to parents and school administrators how we are reaching and positively influencing the lives of each individual student. We should know our students' strengths and weaknesses. For example, if we know that Mary needs to improve her eye-hand coordination, we must prescribe a way for Mary to be successful. We should invite parents and administrators into our classrooms. We should work with our PTA and community to let them see how our programs work. We should make use of modern technology, such as web sites to keep our school community informed about our programs and our goals. And we must do our best to ensure our students are active outside of school by using logs, journals, and regularly communicating with parents.

Test scores do have value but must be used properly: To benefit individual students and advance them to higher levels of skill or knowledge. For physical education to prosper, our programs must be well planned and based on national and local standards. Only when school communities see the different ways that physical education benefits each of our students, will we begin to get away from the current trend of depending on test scores to defend the value of our programs.