By Mike Antonucci
Education Intelligence Agency

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Last week in a post about school district consolidation, I bemoaned the fact that education policymakers seem to suffer collective amnesia about reforms that have been tried before. Now, right on cue, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced plans for the state to do away with fill-in-the-bubble tests in favor of “computerized exams that emphasize critical thinking over memorization, complete with essay questions.”

Many of you will applaud this news, as many did back in 1993 when the state created the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), which was also an attempt to emphasize critical thinking. Instead it read like a bad parody of progressive education ideas. The Los Angeles Times described it this way:

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Radically different in style from older standardized tests, the new assessment system seeks to gauge what students know through a variety of methods: from doodling exercises and group discussions to essays that require students to connect literary themes to their lives.

You might think “doodling” is a harsh description, but it’s accurate. Students were provided with an outline drawing of an empty head and directed to write or draw their feelings about a reading passage inside the head.

Fortunately the American Institutes for Research recognized that lessons could be learned from CLAS. The organization published a report last September in which it sought to apply those lessons to the Common Core debate. The result is a mostly sympathetic account of the CLAS debacle, but it highlights the pitfalls that still exist for those who believe our current system of standardized testing is the root of all evil.

Bubble tests are an insufficient measure of education achievement, but eliminating them is unlikely to lead to improvement in achievement, or even assessment. Evaluations should be both subjective and objective. One without the other is incomplete.