Imagine a five-year-old sitting at a tiny desk with a pencil in hand, gazing at a sheet of questions intended to gauge whether or not she is reaching anticipated developmental milestones. She is still unable to read every word. The room is quiet in a way that a child finds unsettling—not the cozy quiet of a library, but the tense quiet of a place where something is being scrutinized. She moves around in her chair. Her stomach aches. Apparently, this is education.
For years, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been fighting against this perception. Its stance on standardized testing for children under the age of eight is unambiguous: when used as high-stakes performance indicators, these tests are developmentally inappropriate, potentially harmful, and, in the words of its supporters when they wish to ensure that policymakers truly pay attention, a form of institutional harm to children who are not yet prepared to deal with the anxiety, the abstraction, or the consequences. It’s a powerful framing. Additionally, it is based on a corpus of research that has been quietly—and not so quietly—accumulating for decades.
Although administrators seeking comparable, scalable data often dominate policy discussions, the developmental argument is not difficult. The development of young children is inherently uneven. A four-year-old is not failing if she is still unable to sit still for twenty minutes. A six-year-old who has trouble answering written questions but can accurately and animatedly explain the same concept verbally is not behind; rather, his processing style is different. By their very nature, standardized tests reduce all of this to a numerical value. Unfortunately, children are neither machine-readable nor uniform, despite the fact that they are designed to generate consistent, machine-readable results. One aspect of brain research has been consistent: the brain’s ability to think at a higher level effectively shuts down when young children are subjected to the kind of stress that high-stakes testing creates. The very abilities that are being assessed become inaccessible. The child’s knowledge is not being tested. You’re testing the child’s reaction to danger.
Observing the testing industry in action gives the impression that the money involved distorts the discourse. In the US alone, the field of standardized testing is worth billions of dollars. In addition to producing the exams, test companies also produce the practice exams, study guides, and tutoring services that help students do well on the exams. The test becomes easier to handle if your family can afford the preparation. It doesn’t if your family can’t. Given that the testing industry’s market structure makes the results so predictable, OMEP’s claim that standardized testing increases inequality rather than measures it is hard to refute. There is no level playing field when a child from a low-income family attending an underfunded school takes the same test as a child whose parents spent $2,000 on preparation. It is a system that verifies what it was unintentionally intended to verify.
Instead, OMEP suggests something more defensible but less attention-grabbing. A more complete and accurate picture of a young child’s development is produced by authentic assessment, which includes teacher observations, work portfolios, and play-based evaluations carried out in actual classroom settings. For example, the OMEP Early Childhood Sustainability Rating Scale is not a ranking system, but rather an internal professional development tool. The distinction is very important. The dynamic in the room shifts when assessment is used to enhance learning rather than to categorize kids. The incentive for the teacher shifts. The experience of the child shifts. Teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School, who are well-known for refusing to give the Measures of Academic Progress test, had an innate understanding of this. It was also recognized by hundreds of Texas school districts that adopted resolutions denouncing standardized testing as a stifling force in public education. What practitioners have been saying internally for years now has an international framework thanks to OMEP.
The term “abuse,” which advocacy circles use to wake people up, may go beyond what the evidence clearly calls for. It is more difficult to argue that it is not neutral to put a six-year-old through a high-stress, timed, machine-graded evaluation of skills she is still developing and then use the results to determine her educational path. It has quantifiable negative effects, such as anxiety, curriculum narrowing, teachers devoting the entire year to test preparation rather than actual learning, and children internalizing early on that they are “low” or “behind” based on a snapshot that reveals nearly nothing about them. OMEP is not using language carelessly. It is attempting to ensure that the harm is sufficiently identified so that it cannot be discreetly ignored.
An international early childhood organization’s opposition to the testing industry won’t cause it to vanish. Because test scores are straightforward, comparable, and fundable, politicians will continue to strive for them. However, it is becoming more difficult to dismiss the argument. A five-year-old with a stomachache in a testing room is too uncomfortable to continue pretending to be a good idea, the research is too consistent, and the practitioner experience is too uniform.
