Commenting on the permanency of the new country’s newly established Constitution, Benjamin Franklin noted “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” If Franklin had been able to cheat death and live another hundred years or so, I have no doubt that he would have found tests, particularly those administered by the state, as a suitable, and alliterative, replacement for death in his pithy observation.
For although no one has yet been able to erase the certainty of death from the world, there are certainly a lot of people, time, money, and other resources devoted to doing so, or at least to delaying its inevitable arrival for as long as possible. That includes plenty of tax dollars, although perhaps not as many today as yesterday.
The same cannot said regarding tests and taxes. Sure, there are pockets of people here and there who opt out and oppose them. Most people, however, are consumed with reforming or improving them, sometimes reducing them, but rarely eradicating them. Even today, one finds more people questioning the relevance and permanency of the Constitution than of either tests or taxes. When was the last time there was an acclaimed Broadway play about Smarter Balanced, MCAS, or even NAEP?
So, today on Tax Day, I ask what is it that state tests and taxes have in common?
The Right Kind of Wrong
First, deep down nobody likes them, and usually with good reason. Oh sure, you’ll get podcasts, posts, and panels of talking heads telling you why taxes and state tests are essential, and they are essential, how can we live without them. But those do-gooders, demagogues and democrats don’t really like them (yes, even the democrats). How could you? Let’s face it. Like annual physicals, they’re a necessary evil.
Can’t Fight The Moonlight
Second, taxes and state tests are universal. They apply to everybody. All means all. No child left behind.
Well, except for the rich, of course. From what I’ve heard, the rich know how to avoid taxes; and we know that they can easily avoid state tests by sending their kids to private schools, although I’m pretty sure that avoiding state tests would be way down on the list of reasons why they send their kids to private schools. I know that state tests didn’t even crack the top ten reasons why I sent my daughter to private school for middle and high school – and I’m nowhere close to rich as evidenced by the two extra tax forms that I had to fill out this year for the $30 long-term gain on the sale of a stock that I apparently obtained in a shrewd purchase 30 years ago.
Ah, those halcyon days of the mid-1990s when we were all day traders in addition to our day jobs in state testing. I had two numbers on speed dial (remember speed dial): my wife’s office number and the toll-free line to buy/sell stocks. As psychometricians, day trading fell right into our wheelhouse, our comfort zone. It was all about looking for signs and patterns in numbers that someone else had developed; abstract metrics on scales that we didn’t really understand, but nonetheless trusted, well, because. If the numbers were right, there was no need to actually understand, or even know, what the company did. I’m sure that you can see how that scenario would be appealing to your typical psychometrician, but that’s a topic for another day.
Let’s get back to state tests and taxes.
Nothin’ Better To Do
Third, both tax preparation and state tests are annual activities that take a disproportionate amount of time and effort for the value that they provide. They tell you that state tests and preparing tax returns will take about 10-13 hours on average, but we all know a) averages are meaningless, b) that’s wishful thinking, at best, and b) that 10-13 hour estimate doesn’t include all of the additional time needed for “test” and “tax” related activities and the cumulative disruptions they cause.
Of course, poorly written instructions can also add significant time. My pet peeve this year, the instructions for Form 1040, Line 16 – the “Tax” line, a pretty important line. After the necessary introductory gobbledygook, you encounter the straightforward sentence:
If your taxable income is less than $100,000, you must use the Tax Table, later in these instructions.
Now, my science of reading tells me, OK, your income is less than $100,000, so you must use the Tax Table, which by the way begins on page 63 of this 113-page manual. There’s no need to read the remaining 3 pages devoted to filling out Line 16. Must means must. Do not pass go. Collect my $200 refund or pay what I owe.
However, when I compared final numbers with my wife (we use redundant, independent analysis as our method of tax form QC), turns out I was wrong. Following a nice reminder to use the correct column in the Tax Table and instructions for those of you with taxable incomes over $100,000 or more to use the Tax Computation Table right after the Tax Table, things take a turn for the worse. The next paragraph begins “However, don’t use the Tax Table or Tax Computation Worksheet if any of the following applies.” A clear violation of instruction manual writing Rule #1, and seriously, who starts a paragraph with “However.” (By the way, “the following” refers to two pages of conditional conditions, which fortunately for us my wife read. She’s a stickler for reading the fine print and all of those cards in museums, too.)
Next, we move on to the heart of the matter, the most important similarity between state tests and taxes.
A One-Way Ticket
Fourth, both state tests and tax forms are a data collection activity conducted by the government (state or federal) in which information is intended to flow in one direction and only one direction; that is, from you to them. That statement should be obvious with regard to tax forms, but it applies equally well to state tests.
Not only do you already have the information that you are providing on the tax forms, but you have also been able to access and monitor it throughout the year in real time as each paycheck was issued, each dividend was paid, capital gain (or loss) was realized, and interest accrued. Perhaps conditions changed during the year, and you made an adjustment to your withholding amount or estimated tax payments. There should be no major surprises at the end of the process regarding the refund you are getting or the amount you owe. Sure, the amount may be off a bit from what you expected, but within a reasonable margin of error.
The same holds true for state tests. When a student sits down in the spring to take the state test, the teacher, the student, and the student’s parents/guardians all already should know everything they need to know about that student’s proficiency on and mastery of the state standards. They should be familiar with the state’s content and achievement standards and already know whether the student is performing at the Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced level. Sure, there will be borderline students whose test score might fall on one side of the achievement level threshold or another on any given test day, but they should know that, too. All year long, in real time, they have been collecting information on the student’s strengths and weaknesses, much better information than the state test will ever be able to provide.
As I have said and written time and time again, the state test should not be providing teachers, students, and parents any information about an individual student’s performance that they don’t already know. To the extent that that statement is not true there is a problem to be solved, whether that problem is an “honesty gap,” a misunderstanding of the standards, or a lack of communication. Unless we want to go down the road of incompetence or educational malpractice, those are the three main reasons for a real disconnect between state test results and expectations.
Am I oversimplifying for the sake of argument? Perhaps a little, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Could there be other explanations for a disconnect between classroom-based expectations and test results such as a student having a particularly good or bad day, or newly introduced changes to the content/achievement standards? Sure, but. The introduction of new standards will likely result in a mean shift that affects everyone, not an individual student here and there. The “bad day” or “doesn’t test well” explanation might be true, but more often than not it’s a weak excuse not an explanation and not trusting the data is a precarious path to start down. Trust, but verify.
Something’s Gotta Give
Now, we’ve reached the fork in the road, and it’s a big one. It’s the place where tax forms and state tests veer in different directions.
Our annual exercise of completing tax forms not only provides no information that we don’t already know, in virtually all cases, it also provides no information that the IRS doesn’t already know. The government already has 99.99% of the information that you are providing on your tax forms. Sure, they give you the opportunity to report winnings from your office March Madness ® pool or income from your lemonade stand, but pretty much everything else they know. And if you us an app for either of those two transactions, they probably know those, too.
It wasn’t always this way, of course, but it’s evolved over time. Whether that evolution has made life overall better or worse is an open question, but tax collection has evolved over time in response to certain realities; and that’s something state testing has been slow to do.
I’m not advocating for a world in which Big Brother sees everything going on in the classroom and knows about the proficiency of every student in real time. I am certain, however, that we should already live in a world in which more information about student achievement is collected unobtrusively throughout the school year and shared seamlessly with the state. Kristen Huff and her colleagues talk about the future of assessment being invisible. As recently as five years ago, with the Race To The Top assessment consortia experience fresh in my mind, I would have interpreted that statement as meaning that the future of state testing is something that we cannot see or don’t want to see. Now, thankfully, it means something different. It means that as a field, we are finally starting to think about ways in which the massive data collection effort that is state testing can evolve.
And make no mistake, state testing like taxes, is a data collection activity. Data that monitors the achievement of individual students and groups of students, but data than can also then be incorporated into models more complex than the three-parameter IRT model to better understand student performance, student learning, and school effectiveness.
And if one thing is certain, it’s that we need to better understand student performance, student learning, and school effectiveness.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 