Educational Qualtiy Control

I want to build on my concept of testing as educational quality control that I started in my last post.

Quality control, or quality assurance, as it is sometimes called, is a core function in every manufacturing plant I’ve ever seen. We continuously check product at every stage, from incoming raw material to assembly to final audit before shipping. The question is always the same: does the product meet specifications? Put another way, what we are doing is verifying that the manufacturing process is generating the desired result.

If you check parts, and find you aren’t getting the correct result, then there is a problem with the process. But until you do your quality checks, you don’t know what you are producing. Also, one of the key guidelines of quality control is to check your quality as early in the process as possible. It makes no sense to wait until after you have finished final assembly to test the product and discover there was a problem with the first step in the assembly process. Finally, a good quality control program relies on objective evidence. If a good part has to be round within .004”, everyone agrees on that, and everyone agrees on how to measure the part. There is never any discussion of “the parts look round enough to me.” It is either round within .004”, or it is not. If not, then there is a problem, and we have to fix the problem.

In education, standards and standardized testing take the place of quality control. That’s why I can never understand why the educational establishment fights so hard against standardized testing. Actually, that’s not true. I completely understand why teachers fight so hard against testing. If I had a complete lack of accountability for producing the desired result in my job, I would want to protect that too.

What I don’t understand are the lame excuses offered as to why we shouldn’t use standardized tests to evaluate the performance of our education processes. For example, “all we do is teach to the test.” If the test is a representative sample of what we want students to know, than test scores should accurately show the students’ mastery of that body of knowledge.

Conversely, without testing, there is no way to establish that the student has learned anything. And based on my experience trying to employ a number of high school graduates, many of them really haven’t learned anything.