One of my favorite quotes from the reading is “If you have a poor instrument, then you will always make poor decisions.” I think is summarizes so many points that were made in the article including the call for independent people to run assessments on the assessments and statistics that politicians are claiming as good returns.
In general reading about testing is always like someone running their nails down a black board to me, it always has all of the usual suspects, linguistic minority children. For me that is the most deplorable part of testing, especially for high stakes testing, it will always favor the dominant group and dominant thinking. When it is used as the only assessment, to make big decisions in students lives, like whether they can get a diploma or pass a grade, it seems inhumane to me to use this as an only measure. While research and teachers may not support this kind of action, so many parent and politicians do. There seems to be this obsessive need to make a complex system, education, into something that is simple and one-sided. In the end it just waters down education and stamps out things like creativity, diversity in thinking and perceptions, higher order thinking skills and the list can go on and on. If we are just expecting students to pass test based on some skill set that favors a group of people and nothing else is considered, how much valuable diversity are we stamping out in the name of keeping things simple and accountable?
Part of the article also talked about how schools that have a high pass rate to do not teach to the test, they just don’t worry about it and teach other things. While schools who do not have good records on testing spend so much instruction time teaching to the test. Is this not widening the gap even more? High performing schools are going to be teaching higher order thinking skills, creative arts etc.. while low performing schools will be just trying to get kids to pass this test. This seems to fly in the face of what standardized testing is suppose to do, which is to equalize education for all.
An interesting part of this article that I had not thought about before was the issue of “cheating” or unethical behavior in regards to testing. Helping kids with the right answers, changing scores, all that lead to an unreal inflation of student success and do not paint a real picture of what is happening. I guess when you talk about testing being tied to funding, raises etc.. that this would only increase the attraction of cheating on testing. This is just another disturbing part of testing that I had not thought of before, but that makes perfect sense.
I did like how the article ended with what educators and researchers can do, they had some very good suggestions on how to fight high-stakes testing. It can not be the only acheivement factor that matters for students, other alternates have to be used as well. I really like the suggestion of not being suduced by what you think high-stakes testing can achieve. It’s so true, who is going to argue with making schools accountable? Nobody, but it is the way that it is carried out that matters.
September 10, 2009 at 4:25 am |
Hello,
The publishing of this article corresponds with the date of the NCLB law (2001). I remember the first time I read this article as NCLB came into effect and I began to see in Missouri how the MAP (Missouri Assessment Profile) went from being a useful tool for us to see how kids were doing in math, reading, etc. to being a guiding force in the state. This was my second year teaching, and my second to last year teaching. I would go back now, with what I know now, but at the time I remembered everything I learned in school about the impacts (disparate) of testing on linguistically diverse/racial minority/economically challenged populations.
If you were to ask teachers you know, today, what do you think TAKS can achieve, what do you think the answers might be? How might those answers have changed from 2001? What if you asked parents? Across racial/ethnic/class lines? It’s interesting to think at various levels of policy, what assumptions about what testing can achieve may influence the writing of policy.
-Melissa
-Melissa