Oh Well, Education Testing Reform Movement Results in No Gains

by: Hopeful

Fri May 27, 2011 at 04:07:50 PM EDT

Nearly a decade of America's test-based accountability systems, from "adequate yearly progress" to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and insufficient safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report.

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...staff and students facing accountability sanctions tend to focus on behavior that improves the test score alone, such as teaching test-taking strategies or drilling students who are closest to meeting the proficiency cut-score, rather than improving the overall learning that the test score is expected to measure. This undercuts the validity of the test itself.

The good news is that students are not necessarily learning any less under the new systems as far as we can tell, although there are more drop-outs. It's just that all the resources spent on this "reform" is a waste if there aren't results:

"We need to look seriously at the costs and benefits of these programs," said Daniel M. Koretz, a committee member and an education professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. "We have put a lot into these programs over a period of many years, and the positive effects when we can find them have been pretty disappointing."

One would have to go on and wonder if there is another agenda at stake. A lot of people and companies are getting rich by connecting up with politicians. In any case, if I ever hear complaints that the teachers don't like high stakes testing, I'll now classify it with complaints that male teachers don't wear ties often enough. Neither one has anything to do with student learning.