We have a very expensive habit of creating and administering standardized assessments. Do you remember taking tests in school? Yeah, yeah, you do. Chances are, you may have been one of those people who said, I'm going to stay up all night, I'm going to study. I'm going to read all these things. And if I can just remember 25 more of these vocabulary words, the probability of my score goes up 2.3 percent. Or maybe, maybe you were one of those ones who said, If I just lay this book on my head, the words will automatically seep into my brain. No matter either situation, you knew that the outcome of those assessments would play a very important role in your future. So chances are, if you grew up in any of the 50 states in America, you participated in standardized assessments. In fact, depending on where you live, you may have started in third grade.

and then tested every year,
until you graduated. Now, as a nation, even though we didn't really embrace
this notion of written assessments until around 1845, Dr. William Reese teaches
us that this process, this notion of labeling
and compartmentalizing children, started long before that,
something like 150 years. And I did the math. Think about it. We were testing and labeling children
before we were a country. It's a process that has always
been embedded in our cycle of teaching and learning. It's as American as apple pie. And that's some expensive pie,
because let me tell you, the standardized testing industry
is a billion-dollar industry. It's used as a mechanism to define
racialized achievement gaps, to dictate student promotion, to disseminate school resources, and sometimes decide
if it’s a “good” school or a “bad” school. Now, once upon a time, I was a school and district leader,
and I did the back-of-the-envelope math.

And I've got to tell you, in my career, I've interfaced with, I've participated in something like 203,760
standardized assessments. And that's a low-ball count. I was working, listen, I was working,
and one thing I learned, one thing I learned from my teachers
and from my students, is that my students actually learned
more and performed better, and my teachers were actually much better
pedagogues in times of non-testing as opposed to high-stakes testing. Right? So here's the reality. Here's some of what I faced. Have you ever seen a student
collapse into tears because she could not remember
the “Do-Nothing Presidents?” Or what about the student who -- this is what I'm saying, you've seen it? I’ve seen it, I seen’t ’em. Or have you ever interfaced with a student
who literally broke into hives? And, I mean, we had to call in the nurse
to put ice packs on this baby's chest.

because he could not participate
in that makeup exam because he had to go to college, and he needed that test
score by that date. I've also had students who were more willing to punch
each other in the face, to literally get into a fight, rather than to sit down and participate
in a paper-pencil test. It ain't right. Now people say that money
is the root of all evil. But I've got to be honest, as an educator, I don't think that standardized
assessments are too far off. Audience: Mhm. TW: Mhm. (Laughter) Standardized assessments,
as a form of accountability, do not improve teacher practice. They don't build thinkers
and creators in students. Now, what if I told you that the quality of education
that we offer to students can be improved through a strategic
disinvestment in standardized testing as a form of accountability? Now, in one of my roles, I serve as the Education
Stratification fellow

at the Institute on Race, Power,
and Political Economy. I know, you like my title. I like it too. Tell somebody. (Laughter) I study the construct of race. I look at rankings and status
and distributions of power. I examine political economies. And all that's really, really fancy. But what it really means
is that I look at income and wealth as pertaining to education
and its outcomes. So for the last 10 years or so, I've worked in and researched
New York City schools. Now, with the understanding
that history class is the place where students most often
come into contact with the world and its cultures, I thought, well, let's start there. United States history and all
of its accompanying exams. So in New York, like in most places, there are standards
that dictate all of the skills that we want students to acquire. There's a curriculum that lays out
the who, what, when, where, why.

the people, the places, the things
that we want to expose students to. And there’s an assessment that says: these are all the important things that we've got to make sure
these kids know by the end of the year. These three documents
serve as the foundation upon which the US history curriculum
has been curated in New York. Now this, this is a visual depiction of some of the imagery
that our students see when they participate in this class. And you may know some of these images because they were pulled
directly from textbooks. We don't have time to go through
the entire curriculum in this format, so I've organized the data
a little differently for you. This data visualization
uses squares to represent males, circles to represent females, triangles to represent our non-binary, and diamonds for everything
that doesn't fit in a gendered category. Now, in terms of color, we've used a spectrum of skin hues. We've also used our census denotation.

So our white folks are represented
by that lightest pigmentation. And then when we get
all the way to the other end, the richest, the most melanated,
the darkest of the colors that's associated with our
Black and African Americans. This visualization shows you
each and every topic that we want to expose students to
over the course of the year, in chronological order. So we're going to dig a little deeper, and I want to zero in on the people. But the beat I want to take here is that it's not just people
that we randomly stumble across, it's who they were, what their contribution was
to the story of US history, what their narrative is,
and how it fits with this history course. So these are the people
that we actually study in this course, sorted by race and gender. Now we've got a good concept
of what we teach in that class or what we expose students to. We have a good concept of the people
who surface in that class.

Now I want to look at assessments, and remember, assessments pull out
the most important information that we want our students to know. So this visualization shows us the people who are of most importance on that multiple-choice
exam in August 2023. This is June 2023, this is January 2020, and this is 2019. So when we look at all
of this data set together, and the significance
of looking at all four years is that this is that last cohort. These are the students
that we pushed out into the world. And this is what we most wanted them
to remember regarding US history. The people, the people
whose narratives really told the tale. And I have a wondering, might some narratives be missing? Because I've got to be honest, there's a distinguishable
amount of white squares. So when we look into the curriculum, when we dig a little deeper and we look
at that in a bar graph format,

we can see where some
of that inequity actually begins. Can you see it now? So this is the part,
this is the part that's easy. You look at my data set, you can see that. There are also parts
that you can't see as closely. These pieces that have become
rituals of normalcy. They manifest themselves in pieces like racialized hierarchies
of intelligence, like legislative wars over what students
should and should not read, like millions of dollars in and out
of curriculum companies as they curate a story
of the United States. Like wealth and income inequities
amongst people of color. Now, an irony of these assessments, or the data that we glean
from these students, is that it actually feeds more
into a political economy than it does classroom instruction. It's like the whole utility, the whole function of those standardized
assessments gets lost. Reason being, we are not forefronting
building teacher capacity.

or deepening students' knowledge in the process that we’re using. And we are spending
billions of dollars to do that. Now I used to say, I used to say that the color
of achievement, we can look and we can associate it
with hues classified by race. But maybe, maybe the color of achievement is green. Now, the way that we are currently
rolling out these assessments results in an inadvertent focus
on a very specific, a very laser-point focused point of view that will not equip our students
to be ever-evolving citizens in this crazy society
that continues to change. We have created a memorization test where the most likely answer
is the white male. So I said it at the onset, and I feel compelled to say it again: I believe that the quality of education
that we offer to children can be improved through
a strategic disinvestment in leveraging standardized assessments
as a form of accountability. What we're doing right now
does not build thinkers.

We need tinker thinkers. What we're doing right now
does not build creators, and we need creators. So imagine, imagine a world where all of the minutes
of the instructional day are used in service of creating the people
who are going to run society. The radical solution is an economic one. Shift the focus of assessments
back into the classroom, where the teachers can use it
to make pedagogical decisions, and where the students can be informed about what they know
and what they don't know. So for my federal
and my state policymakers, sample test. (Laughter) Understandably, you would love
a mathematical equation that allows you to put
every single decimal point on that spreadsheet, but I assure you, you do not have to test
every single American child 112 times in their compulsory school years for you to decide that the school
up the street needs more books. Sample test. It's easier, it's cheaper, it's faster.

and it gives way more instructional hours
back into the instructional day. For my local districts
and my school boards, it's OK to have standards. I have standards, but I need you to prioritize
standards over standardization. We do not need to test
every single child the same exact way, particularly if that way does not
bring out that child's gifts or skills. Say it after me. Standards. Audience: Standards. TW: Over. Audience: Over. TW: Standardization.
Audience: Standardization. It sounds like a button, right? I should get some buttons made. I should get some buttons made. Now for my principals, oh, this is fun because I had this gig. Principals, you need
to resource your teachers. There are a lot of things in the building
that you cannot control, but one thing you can control is ensuring
that your teachers, your staff, your crew have every single resource and skill that they need
to do their job effectively.

and that they're making good on that, that they are doing
their jobs effectively. And know that every time
you interact with a teacher, every time you build
that teacher's capacity and give that teacher
what he, she, or they need, they are working with a child, and that child will go out to solve
the problems of the world. Now for my teachers, you actually have
a really fun job as well. You get to ask the questions
that no one knows the answers to. And here's the thing, you can't be wrong
because nobody knows the answer, right? You get to pose unfathomable scenarios, all in pursuit of cultivating
those thinkers of tomorrow. Because the problems, the questions for which we don't have answers today, become the catalyst to the solutions
that we need for tomorrow. I'm going to say it again. The questions that are unanswered today serve as the catalyst for the solutions
that we need for tomorrow.

That's how we cultivate a growing society. That's how we build thinker tinkers. The innovations that we need for tomorrow
have yet to be conceived, but they can start, my teachers,
in your classroom, under your watch. Now for my students, my families, my community members, and everybody else, I need you to hold folks accountable. One thing history teaches us is that we cannot sit back and wait
for those empowered to make policy that is inclusive. Policy changes, curriculum changes, people changes can come from the people and be for the people. And people work. People work, that's good work. So let's do some of that
people work together. Divest in standardized assessments and invest in humanity. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)

The Billion-Dollar Problem in Education | Tanishia Lavette Williams | TED

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