F for Assessment – Edutopia.org
August 22, 2007
F for Assessment
Credit: VEER: James Godman
For the last four decades, students’ scores on standardized tests
have increasingly been regarded as the most meaningful evidence for
evaluating U.S. schools. Most Americans, indeed, believe students’
standardized test performances are the only legitimate indicator of a
school’s instructional effectiveness. Yet, although test-based
evaluations of schools seem to occur almost as often as fire drills, in
most instances these evaluations are inaccurate. That’s because the
standardized tests employed are flat-out wrong.
Standardized tests have been used to evaluate America’s schools
since 1965, when the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
became law. That statute provided for the first major infusion of
federal funds into local schools and required educators to produce
test-based evidence that ESEA dollars were well spent. But how, you
might ask, could a practice that’s been so prevalent for so long be
mistaken? Just think back to the many years we forced airline
attendants and nonsmokers to suck in secondhand toxins because smoking
on airliners was prohibited only during takeoff and landing. Some
screwups can linger for a long time. But mistakes, even ones we’ve
lived with for decades, can often be corrected once they’ve been
identified, and that’s what we must do to halt today’s wrongheaded
school evaluations. If enough educators — and noneducators — realize
that there are serious flaws in the way we evaluate our schools, and
that those flaws erode educational quality, there’s a chance we can
stop this absurdity. Click here to read on…
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