Despite protests from parents and educators over standardized tests, education expert Robert Pondiscio says that the tests aren't the problem.
"I just don't think that standardized tests are the problem, honestly," Pondiscio, senior fellow of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" on
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
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"If you're over the age of 40 like I am, you probably remember going to school and testing was just another day. We had standardized tests when we were kids. What we didn’t' have is this infrastructure around it, the accountability, and test scores weren't attached to individual teachers," he explained.
"Testing should not be the most important day of the school, it should just be like going to the doctor, just another day of school," he said.
However, Pondiscio told Newsmax that testing is very important and shouldn't be abandoned.
"Education reform runs on data, so to speak, and data is testing and when you opt out of testing you're basically robbing the system of the data it needs to make decisions," he explained.
"If you're in favor of things like choice and charters, we probably wouldn't have those things if it were not for the rich data that we were getting from testing over the years that showed" how schools are doing, he said.
"Some of our schools are great; some of them are terrible. Testing data is how we know which is which," Pondiscio added.
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