Assess That! Standardized Testing in the Arts Nancy Flanagan
When it comes to assessing music students, and their learning, I can say with confidence that I am a bona fide expert.
I did this work for thirty years--by my count, evaluating well over 5000 music students, giving them grades and feedback. Which only means I had lots of practice--not necessarily proficiency--but my depth of experience does matter. Over three decades, I developed and continuously adjusted a conceptual framework for evaluating the most important skills and knowledge of student musicians, using (and often subsequently rejecting) multiple models and metrics. I did it wrong before I did it right. Once I understood that I finally had it right, for my program and my students, I kept fine- tuning.
I also served on the 16-member national team that created the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certificate for music teachers, under the guidance of Edu- cational Testing Service (ETS), pretty much the gold standard in educational assessment at the time. I was a benchmarker for hundreds of NB portfolio cases and written exams, setting performance standards, observing the think- ing and work of National Board Certification candidates in music (who tend to be a high- performing, self-evaluative group already). I learned a lot about valid and reliable perfor- mance assessment from these experiences.
Which is why I am increasingly alarmed by— some—arts teachers’ enthusiasm over the idea that standardized tests will save their employ- ment bacon. Everyone else has standardized tests—why shouldn’t we? Especially if the costly development and administration of those tests will lead to more job security and retain- ing threatened music and art programs. Isn’t it better for arts teachers to be evaluated by student data around content they actually teach than having their jobs rest on value-added scores in literacy and math generated by other teachers in their building or grade level?
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Be careful what you wish for. Assessment drives instruction, in ways sometimes hard to foresee. When test-makers use easy-to-stan- dardize concepts and easy-to-construct assess- ment models, we lose more than “freedom.” We lose a big piece of what makes the arts critical to the learning of all students.
Florida and South Carolina have already de- veloped multiple-choice standardized tests for music, mostly as a means of evaluating teach- ers. Florida is experimenting with machine- scored performance assessments. Critics who might wonder about what will happen to the joy of performance or the limited opportunities children have to express themselves through the arts will face the brick wall of education reform.
Here’s Sara Mead, Principal Policy Analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, on what matters most in assessing the arts:
The point of arts education shouldn’t be to teach children to simply “enjoy art”- -we are, after all free to choose which art we enjoy, or whether we enjoy it at all. Rather, it should be to give children the skills and background knowledge to experience art or music in an informed and more than superficial sense--much of which is about understanding and identifying concepts, vocabulary, and techniques in ways that can be assessed through multiple choice assessments. A major reason that high-quality educa- tion needs to include the arts is certain arts-related information--such as names and work of key artists and composers, specific musical or artistic vocabulary and meanings, and artistic movements over time and their relationship to broader historical and social trends--is key cultural knowledge that our students need to be culturally literate. But arts and music instruction in our schools has often ignored cultural literacy and key concepts in favor of performance and “creativity.”
Policy / Advocacy
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