March/April 2005

A Decades-Old Battle

The debate over Head Start's National Reporting System is the latest skirmish in an often heated battle over testing young children. In the 1980s, as part of the education reforms enacted in the wake of the landmark report A Nation at Risk, states and school districts increasingly implemented testing programs for children as soon as kindergarten, or earlier. These programs included screening tests to determine whether children were ready to enter kindergarten or first grade and achievement tests for first and second graders, modeled on tests for older children, which were intended to hold schools accountable for student performance.

Early childhood educators reacted strongly to this trend. In a 1987 policy statement, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) cautioned against most forms of testing before age eight. The statement noted that tests are appropriate if they provide information that can contribute to improving outcomes for children, but warned that most standardized tests fail to meet this standard. Because of the wide variations in children's development, tests seldom yield valid results, the statement said: "Rather than use tests of doubtful validity, it is better not to test, because false labels that come from tests may cause educators or parents to alter inappropriately their treatment of children."

In place of standardized tests, early childhood educators argued for "developmentally appropriate" practices, such as informal assessments, including teacher observations and portfolios, that they consider sensitive to the way young children grow and learn.

The NAEYC statement, and the strong sentiment behind it, proved enormously influential. By 1996, according to a report by the National Education Goals Panel, "almost all state-mandated standardized testing for purposes of school accountability had been eliminated for children below grade 3." And states increasingly adopted informal assessments for preschool programs, according to research by the Erikson Institute, a Chicago-based graduate school in child development. However, the use of tests for accountability in early education began to reemerge in the late 1990s, in large part because of the influence of the standards-based reform movement in elementary and secondary schools.

For Further Information

C. Horton and B.T. Bowman. Child Assessment at the Preprimary Level: Expert Opinion and State Trends. Chicago: Erikson Institute, 2002.

National Association for the Education of Young Children, Standardized Testing of Young Children 3 through 8 Years of Age.Washington, DC: Author, 1987.