The Testing Charade by Daniel Koretz

Author:Daniel Koretz [Koretz, Daniel ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-40885-9
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Incompleteness of Tests

I was thinking too narrowly in that meeting with Arne Duncan. What I had in mind was the incompleteness of standardized tests as measures of one tested subject. There are important aspects of the mastery of mathematics, for example, that we can’t capture well—or at all—with current tests. And there are important aspects of mathematics instruction, such as keeping students engaged and fostering their curiosity and eagerness to learn, that aren’t reflected adequately by any measures of student achievement. I’ll come back to this in a later chapter, when I discuss the importance of monitoring educators’ practices as well as student outcomes.

What I was not considering in that meeting was another way in which testing is incomplete: the problem of subjects and grades for which districts and states have no appropriate tests. It didn’t occur to me in that discussion just how unreasonable the responses to this problem would be.

Remember another elementary-school teacher I described at the beginning of this book, Kim Cook, who taught first grade in Alachua County, Florida. Like other states struggling to comply with Duncan’s policies, Florida had statewide tests for only a small proportion of teachers. The state’s truly astonishing solution, you’ll recall, was simply to take scores from teachers who had scores from an appropriate test and use them to “evaluate” teachers who didn’t. Florida had no tests before grade 3, so in Kim’s case her district used the scores from fourth- and fifth-grade students in another school. And Florida was not unique. Tennessee’s teacher-evaluation legislation specified that 35 percent of the evaluation of teachers who had their own growth score on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) system should be based on that score. That left all the others whose students didn’t produce scores that TVAAS could use—teachers in untested grades or subjects. For them, the Tennessee statute takes the Florida approach: use other teachers’ test scores. For teachers who don’t have their own rating, 25 percent of the evaluation should be based on their school’s average TVAAS rating.2

An alternative response to the pressure to evaluate teachers with test scores was to scramble to find or develop some kind of test that could be used to evaluate the teachers for whom the state had none—for example, those who teach music, art, physical education, and some advanced science and math courses, as well as those in untested grades. In some cases, states left it to local districts to sort out the mess. Keep in mind that in most states the large majority of school districts are small. In New York and New England, for example, districts are township- or city-based, not county-wide, so outside of major cities, most districts are very small. These small districts have no capacity to develop good tests or even to screen commercially available tests for quality. I had a number of conversations with the chief state school officer of one of the states that opted for this find-a-test strategy and left the selection to local districts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.