Re: "Time to Rein in the Test Zealots"

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Right.? Instead of doing the hard work of improving schools and children's learning too many people in public education are gaming the system.? Instead of unceasing hand-wringing about testing, just tell them to stop the gaming and do the right thing. .? 

Art


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>
To: ARN Main List <arn-l@interversity.org>; arn2-strategy <arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>; ARN State <ARN-state@yahoogroups.com>; rethinkaccountdc@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 5:08 am
Subject: [arn-l] "Time to Rein in the Test Zealots"









HIGH-STAKES FLIMFLAM?

New York Times Op. Ed. Column?

Octobr 8, 2007?

by Bob Herbert?
?

It's time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a 
stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.?
?

Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea 
that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the 
classroom performance of students.?
?

"Measuring," said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left 
Behind law, "is the gateway to success."?
?

Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open 
the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases 
whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.?
?

Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, 
told me in a recent interview that it's important to ask "whether you 
can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people 
accountable for the tests."?
?

The short answer, he said, is no.?
?

If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in 
raising the test scores of students -- as opposed to improving student 
learning, which is not the same thing -- there are all kinds of 
incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.?
?

"We've now had four or five different waves of educational reform," said 
Dr. Koretz, "that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good 
test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. 
That's really what No Child Left Behind is."?
?

The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more 
effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take 
shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to "game" 
the system.?
?

Guess what's been happening??
?

"We've had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states," 
said Dr. Koretz. "We've had maybe six good studies that ask: 'If the 
scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?' And 
all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.?
?

"In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids 
didn't actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you 
saw no improvement."?
?

There is not enough data available to determine how widespread this 
problem is. "We know it doesn't always happen," said Dr. Koretz. "But we 
know it often does."?
?

He said his big concern is where this might be happening. "There are a 
lot of us in the field," he said, "who think that if we ever really 
looked under the covers, what we'd find is that the shortcuts are 
particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the 
pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have 
more difficulties. But we don't know."?
?

One aspect of the No Child Left Behind law that doesn't get enough 
attention is that while it requires states to make progress toward 
student proficiency in reading and math, it leaves it up to the states 
themselves to define "proficiency" and to create the tests that 
determine what constitutes progress.?
?

That's absurd. With no guiding standard, the states' tests are 
measurements without meaning.?
?

A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the 
Northwest Evaluation Association found that "improvements in passing 
rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the 
difficulty of those tests."?
?

The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the 
roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test 
practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what's needed if we're 
to get any real sense of how well students are doing.?
?

Five years ago, President Bush and many others who had little 
understanding of the best ways to educate children were crowing about 
the prospects of No Child Left Behind. They were warned then about the 
dangers of relying too much on test scores.?
?

But those warnings didn't matter in an era in which reality was left behind.?
?

"No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance," said Mr. Bush, as 
if those who were genuinely concerned about the flaws in his approach 
were in favor of poor performance.?
?

During my interview with Dr. Koretz, he noted that by not rigorously 
analyzing the phenomenon of high-stakes testing, "we're creating an 
illusion of success that is really nice for everybody in the system 
except the kids."?
?

That was a few days before the release of the Fordham Institute Study, 
which used language strikingly similar to Dr. Koretz's. The study 
asserted that the tests used by states to measure student progress under 
No Child Left Behind were creating "a false impression of success."?
?

The study was titled, "The Proficiency Illusion."?
?

?  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09herbert.html?



 


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