NYT Editorial: The Trouble With Testing Mania

[n2doc]

excerpt:
That the real tests were weak, and did not gauge the skills students needed to succeed, made matters worse. Unfortunately, most states did not invest in rigorous, high-quality exams with open-ended essay questions that test reasoning skill. Rather, they opted for cheap, multiple-choice tests of marginal value. While practically making exams the center of the educational mission, the country underinvested in curriculum development and teacher training, overlooking the approaches that other nations use to help teachers get constantly better.

The government went further in the testing direction through its competitive grant program, known as Race to the Top, and a waiver program related to No Child Left Behind, both of which pushed the states to create teacher evaluation systems that take student test data into account. Test scores should figure in evaluations, but the measures have to be fair, properly calibrated and statistically valid — all of which means that these evaluation systems cannot be rushed into service before they are ready.

Foreign nations with the highest-performing school systems did not build them this way. In fact, none of the top-performing nations have opted for a regime of grade-by-grade standardized tests. Instead, they typically have gateway exams that determine, for example, if high school students have met their standards. These countries typically have strong, national curriculums. Perhaps most important, they set a high bar for entry into the teaching profession and make sure that the institutions that train teachers do it exceedingly well.

In Finland, for example, teacher preparation programs are highly competitive and extremely challenging. (The programs are free to students and come with a living stipend.) Close attention is devoted not just to scholarly and research matters but to pedagogical skills.

This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”

the rest
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/opinion/sunday/the-trouble-with-testing-mania.html?hp&_r=0

[eppur_se_muova]

1. K&R. Needs more eyeballs. nt

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. What would really help is....

... less pontificating on this entire subject by the editorial board of the NY Times.

Gilda Radner as Emily Litella was at least *funny*. The above is just tragic.

[Igel]

3. Finland isn't the US. You compare it fairly or you don't.

Most don't. A fair comparison points out so many differences that it's unclear how the American kids we have (as opposed to the ones we'd like) would do under the system.

The testing history is also a bit skewed. Europe has a long history of gateway tests. You test to get into the right high-school-level program. You test to get into post-secondary. People don't call them "high stakes," but while they're not high-stakes for the schools they certainly are for the kids.

My host mother in one country yelled at her daughter--with her older brother joining in--that if she didn't study for her HS entrance exams she'd be trained in how to be a waitress.

Meanwhile, we have the SAT and ACT, which do essentially the same thing as college entrance exams. Nobody likes them.

My main gripe is the rise of standardized testing. NY has had the Regents' exam since forever. Most states haven't. MD instituted standardized testing when I was in high school, and it was in response to the upcoming wave of research showing "Johnny can't read." The test was simple and was designed to find the failing kids. In a mediocre class in a mediocre school, everybody passed. We could read English well enough. We could read maps. We could do arithmetic and fractions. It was an "essential" or "minimum" skills test. No problem with this. Use this kind of test to find, a few years before graduation, who really needs help to learn survival skills. Reading, arithmetic, fractions--those things most of us use almost daily.

Since then the "minimum" has increased. The State of Texas thinks that the photoelectric effect and the strong and weak nuclear forces are "essential knowledge." I find that amusing, except for the fact that if kids don't know enough of this kind of "essential knowledge" they don't graduate high school. Apart from the time when I tried to build a photocell given the raw materials for the heck of it (I was in high school, just don't ask) I've *never* needed to know anything about the PE effect. This is just wrong.