Standardized Testing & Administrative Innumeracy
A Case Study in the Lowering of Educational Standards
Purpose
This page is intended to demonstrate by example how a lack of awareness of cognition combined with an innumerate interpretation of test scores leads to a lowering of educational standards, even though test scores might rise.
The question of cognition comes down to identifying the goal of education. Do we intend to help students learn how to learn, reason and solve complex problems, and be responsible for their own accomplishments (student-centered education,) or do we intend to fill students full of arbitrary knowledge (curriculum-centered education?) Is the same goal appropriate for all students? What do we measure to determine if we are succeeding? What is the measure of success?
Standardized tests reinforce curriculum-centered instruction. They attempt to test whether each separate piece of knowledge and each separate skill in our lists is inside each student. But are the tests reliable? Can they really measure success? Will a student who has maximized his consumption of knowledge automatically achieve at a higher level?
Parts:
- Testing implemented but not understood
- knowledge replaces achievement
- Acceleration - not high standards
- Summation
Background
I accepted a position at a school dedicated to holistic expeditionary
education. In my first two years at the school, standards were amazingly
high. Seventh grade students produced integrated products that looked
like adult quality work, eighth grade students were doing college level
research in Supreme Court precedents. Overall, students were beating the
state average on standardized tests. In my first two years at this school,
I found myself observing the highest performance from middle school students
that I had ever seen - before or since. We were looking at what student
could achieve and saying "Wow!"
However, there were problems. Behavior was not always well controlled.
Many students had noticeable holes in their skill sets. The school had
taken a risky tradeoff. Students were independently producing high quality
integrated projects anticipating real adult work, but many were weak in
the low level rote skills that get tested.
As federal (NCLB) and state regulations increasingly emphasize tested
skills over real accomplishments, the stakes were becoming too high to
risk letting too many rote skills fall through the cracks. So the school
hired a curriculum coordinator to ensure that low level skills that appear
on standardized tests were successfully taught. The stories below review
how the change in focus from high level mastery to low level tested skills
led to a noticeable decline in student successes at our school.
This history will focus on two aspects of education. We will discuss how the focus on the two lowest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy led to decisions that undermined holistic expeditionary approaches to learning and forced teachers to lower their cognitive and achievement expectations for students. We will look at how innumeracy, failure to understand the numbers, was a major part of the decision making process.
NCLB reviews
Part 1: Implementation of Voluntary Standardized Testing
Marketing of the MAP Testing
We knew we needed a means to improve our ability to address the diverse needs of our students. Some performed extremely low, some extremely high. It was not clear to classroom teachers how to address such extremes, and which students had which specific needs. So we invited NWEA's salesman to come talk to us about MAP testing. During the sales pitch, he kept referring to how the RIT Scale quantified learning into equal intervals. He claimed that one point on the RIT scale always meant the same amount of learning. Student performance level could then be easily identified.
The sales pitch should have raised a few red flags for those attending. First, the very idea that learning can be quantified into an evenly spaced scale is sheer nonsense. Even if learning were sufficiently linear to be evenly scaled, cognitive science has not yet advanced far enough to make these distinctions.
The claim that the test will identify learning levels instead of specific needs should have been flagged as an obvious problem. Teachers needed to know what skills needed to be remediated. For example, my algebra students performed very strong with most algebra skills but had serious problems with specific arithmetic skills such as adding fractions. I needed to know which skills to address. I would gain nothing from being told what "performance level" each student was at. Every single student demonstrated a mix of high and low performance. All the teachers knew this, as any educator worth their pay should.
In terms of numeracy, not a single member of the committee spoke up to question the fallacies of the linear learning hypothesis. Not a single person mentioned that learning is nonlinear, can occur in almost any order, does occur in many orders with our students, and thus, "determining a level" will not provide us valid information. The test was based on a scientifically-mathematically invalid concept. We all knew this from experience. Yet, nobody spoke up. We may all have been too rushed to examine what we were being told.
Learning has multiple dimensions. Achieving at high levels is not the same as accelerated learning. Racing through low level knowledge is not the same as mastery. Identifying skills to be remediated is not the same as determining a skill level. The salesman had clearly told us that the test would determine a knowledge level. We should have all recognized that this did not match our philosophy or our needs, yet nobody spoke up. Nobody said, "We are an expeditionary school that values and supports all aspects of learning." Nobody asked, "How will this test help us work at the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy?" Nobody asked, "How will this help us integrate our curriculum?" We were presented with evidence that the test would focus only on the lowest levels of learning, and nobody challenged the proposal by saying, "We already have higher standards than that!" As a committee, we listened to the details but missed the point. We accepted the plausibility of reducing the complex multidimensional process of learning to a one dimensional test score.
Failure to recognize, and speak up about, the strong evidence that the test was based on low cognitive standards and scientific fallacies led to possibly the worst decisions in the history of our school. We would adopt at testing system that would contradict our mission statement and design principles, as well as the best evidence from educational research, and consequently lower our achievement standards.
The structural errors in the test
testing purpose vs. testing outcome
Round 1: The scores don't make sense
As scores came back from the very first round of testing, teachers noticed that many of the scores did not match what they were observing in their classrooms. Some low achieving students tested unusually high; some high achieving students scored unusually low. We noticed, we spoke amongst ourselves, but the problem was never brought up for an administrative discussion.
Anyone with a strong background in math and science would recognize that at this point we should have been performing validation checks. If the test data did not match our observations then something was most likely seriously wrong. We should have noticed that the test focused on knowledge, not achievement. This limited assessment matched neither our school's philosophy, nor our training in cognition and best practices. We should have noticed that the RIT scores from the test failed to give us the specific information we needed about each student. We had strong evidence that the tests were cognitively inaccurate, and numerically unreliable, but we failed act. As a teaching staff, we were too busy doing the daily things that we had to do.
Why the scores don't make sense:
Insistence that teachers use test scores to differentiate curriculum
At one grade level, the two teachers argued over how to break up their math groups. One teacher wanted to split the students up totally based on test scores. The other teacher wanted to split the math groups based on the performance they observed in the classroom. The two grouping methods did not match.
The curriculum coordinator requested that we place a certain student that had tested high on in math into the Algebra 2 group. I had to remind her that since he had not yet had Algebra 1, it would not serve the student or the class to accelerate him. Other members of the team reminded me that this student was not mature enough to be in the accelerated section. Although his intellect was high, his behavior and attitude would have dragged the entire class down. Ironically, we had chosen to provide accelerated math instead of high level math to match standardized testing, but this led to a situation where we could not use the test results to support our high achievers. (I had recommended against that choice.)
From the very start, dependence on one-dimensional test scores was leading to tracking decisions that did not meet the students' real needs or our legal options. We still were not discussing how the test scores failed to determine the specific learning needs of the students, or the evidence that the scores were unreliable, or that we had already made curriculum choices which prevented us from making decisions from the test results.
Growth that doesn't make sense
As scores came in from the second round of tests, hoping to help the classroom teachers, I created growth graphs. I immediately noticed that every single graph had a large percent of students demonstrating unusual declines. I also noticed that every single graph showed a number of students demonstrating unusual gains. Overall, every single graph showed 20% to 50% of the students showing changes that were much larger than would make sense. Scores should not have dropped by more than half a year's learning. Scores should not have improved by more than a year's growth in just half a year. If they did, the teacher should have observed these phenomenal changes! But teachers reported that the growth graphs did not even come close to matching what they were observing in the classroom.
I reported the large rate of growth scores outside the reasonable range to the administrators and my colleagues. Our curriculum coordinator viewed every single graph. But in response to my report she told my colleagues, "Karl, doesn't know what he is talking about. There is no precision problem."
This is where innumeracy and working low on Bloom's Taxonomy really became apparent in our school's decision making processes. Using only an eighth grade skill level in chart and graph reading, one could clearly see that every single growth graph showed extremes that did not make sense. We all had the knowledge and skills to read a basic graph, but as a team we were not using that knowledge to evaluate the reliability of the tests. Our administrators were not asking teachers whether the changes on the graphs matched their classroom observations. We were not working cooperatively to integrate diverse information. Throughout our school's history, we prided ourselves in teaching students to work cooperatively to evaluate and integrate diverse information, but now when it mattered most to our school, we were failing to do it ourselves.
Unreasonable extremes in growth graphs
why it happened and how we noticed
Comparison of MAP scores to EOG scores
As concerns about the reliability of the tests spread throughout the staff, our curriculum coordinator made a comparison between MAP scores and EOG scores for the grade that her son was in. She used this comparison for her class on educational statistics. She proudly reported to staff, "The correlation coefficient is 0.85, and that is a very high number." I reviewed the comparison and pointed out that 23% of the scores demonstrated serious mismatches between the two tests, thus MAP was not a good indicator of performance on the EOG.
Her report also noted that the correlation coefficient for the class overall was was much higher than the correlation coefficients for various subgroups such as IEP students. But our primary purpose for testing was to determine the needs of the various subgroups, particularly IEP students. Her report clearly showed that we could not do this reliably.
Again, our decision making process was being driven by innumeracy and cognition extremely low on Bloom's Taxonomy. The curriculum coordinator never integrated the visual information of the graph which clearly showed some points too high and some points too low. She never evaluated what correlation coefficient necessary for our needs. She never asked whether correlation coefficient would be the best measure of reliability to use for our situation.
Too many scores that don't correlate
Bloom's Taxonomy notes:
- memorizing: the lowest level of cognition
- evaluating and integrating: the highest levels of cognition
correlation coefficient
- to identify individual student needs we would need a correlation of 0.98 or higher.
Others have succeeded this way!
Between my reports that the growth graphs showed clear and obvious precision problems, and other teachers' concerns that the test data did not match their classroom observations and parents were complaining, we had a big meeting to discuss the concerns.
At the meeting, our curriculum coordinator reported how other schools that had significantly improved their EOG scores by using MAP testing to guide curriculum. Every school mentioned was a school in an impoverished neighborhood where state test scores were extremely low. Their critical need was to improve EOG scores. In contrast, our school was in a middle class neighborhood. Our EOG scores somewhat normally distributed from high to low, but beating the state average. As an expeditionary school our critical needs was to involve students in projects that integrate learning at high cognitive levels.
The mismatch between the type of students at our school and the schools that had used MAP testing to bring their EOG scores nearly up to grade level was painfully obvious. One teacher later joked that if we wanted MAP testing to work we would need to find impoverished inner-city students to fill our school. The philosophy and design differences between our school and the other schools was obvious. But we never discussed whether what worked for them should be expected to work for us. We had been asked to believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to education, even though our school had been created specifically to counter the one-size-fits-all mentality. We were being asked to use methods designed to help the lowest performing students rise to grade level with all students, even those already above grade level.
Rejecting an Evaluation of MAP technical reports
At the meeting, I again pointed out that our data clearly showed 20% to 50% of the scores being unreliable. Both the curriculum coordinator and special services coordinator laughed at this claim and suggested that I did not understand statistics.
I asked permission to review NWEA's technical data to see what type of performance we should expect from MAP testing. The administrators present all approved. After about a month of reviewing manuals at home after school, I reported back to the committee. I had found that NWEA's technical manuals showed the same low precision that I had reported. Consequently, we had no reason to expect much improvement in our testing precision.
The curriculum coordinator reprimanded me, accusing me of wasting time, and said that we would continue testing regardless of what I had reported. She clarified that NWEA in their reports advised against using MAP testing to differentiate instruction.
However, we had originally adopted MAP testing to provide data to guide differentiation. We had all attended training how to use test scores to differentiate. And she, herself, had instructed us to use test data as our primary guide for differentiation. And yet, we were now acknowledging that even NWEA advised against using MAP testing guide differentiation.
Low strand precision
One problem that my research helped clarify was that the MAP subject scores do not provide enough information to identify the needs of the students. The score reports average together 4 or 5 strand scores to create a RIT scale number that really has no specific meaning. To even marginally identify student needs we would need to use the strand scores. NWEA published charts that correlate strand scores to skills, but those charts are not highly specific. However, NWEA's manuals, and our in-house data, both clearly showed that strand precision is much lower than overall subject precision. Between the low strand precision, and the charts that are not highly specific, student needs could not be precisely determined. The overall subject scores are too general to provide teachers with information to guide instruction, and the strand scores are too imprecise to guide instruction.
With this observation, it became painfully obvious that teachers already had more accurate and precise information about student performance in their own records (or in the previous teacher's records) and MAP testing was not providing staff any new information to support teachers.
Low precision in strand scores
what strand precision should look like
Negative growth for high achievers
The most disturbing realization garnered from studying NWEA's technical reports was that MAP testing actually correlates to declining performance for high achieving students. I recognized this as a serious red flag, and reported it. Our curriculum coordinator responded by e-mail writing, "Karl, I haven’t digested this fully, but reading the highlighting I do recall from my psychometrics text that all standardized tests correlate to negative growth for high achievers, simply because they are the out-liers and tend to regress toward the mean."
This response saddened me in that it demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge a clear problem, a serious inability to understand the very math being cited, and extremely low expectations for high achievers. High achievers should not be expected to regress toward the mean, they should be expected to proceed to achieve at even higher levels. In fact, we were creating an advanced learners program, because teachers and parents both recognized that, if supported, high achievers will continue to progress rapidly.
High achievers are not mere outliers, in the sense of statistical accidents doomed to regress towards the mean. There is no reason to expect them to regress towards the mean. If they are regressing towards the mean something is probably wrong with the way they are being taught or tested. That's exactly what NWEA's technical report implied. The test appears to contribute to causing those who should be learning the fastest to actually decline in performance. This is a serious problem. Yet, as before, problems were being ignored, and decisions being made, solely on a failure to understand the math behind the test scores.
Testing Continues
In the end, we were told that the administrators had decided to continue MAP testing, regardless of the evidence that the testing was too imprecise to provide reliable information about any student, and that testing did not accurately support the high cognitive standards of our school. We were told that we would continue to make instructional decisions based on the test results, and that we would continue to provide parents with the test scores.
Part 2: Lowering of Standards and Innumerate Decisions Expand Around the School
Opposition to Expeditionary Learning and Holistic Approaches
Even though our school was founded on the expeditionary and holistic philosophies of education, and had a history of high student achievement, we were now being ordered to stop using expeditionary and student-centered methods. Teachers were ordered to drop the projects they were doing with students and increase their focus on tested knowledge and skills. Some teachers were reprimanded for even discussing expeditionary approaches to education. An administrator even told one teacher, "Inquiry-based learning is not what we're about." One teacher was reprimanded for trying to make his subject emotionally relevant to his students. He was told, "You have too much material to cover; you don't have time to do this." One teacher spent the whole year telling me, "I would like to help you with the project that we promised students and parents we would do, but I have been ordered to work on basic skills instead."
Our curriculum coordinator spent the year eliminating approaches to education that were high on Bloom's Taxonomy and based on high standards such as Expeditionary Design Principles, NCTM Standards, and inquiry based learning. She systematically replaced all those practices with knowledge and skill mandates limited to the two lowest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. We were going to focus on test scores regardless of what we had to give up to do it!
In a school that just two years prior had prided itself in integrated expeditionary learning where students, given meaningful contexts, created real products, we were now expected to reduce learning to out of context knowledge lists. We had no time left in our schedule for the expeditions that we had promised to students and families. Just two years prior, we had been encouraged to treat all students as high achievers; now we were being assigned to teach all students using standards designed for low achievers.
- ELS Design Principles
- Inquiry-based learning
To kick off the creation of the high achievers program, our curriculum coordinator announced that we would have a spelling bee. Various teachers had suggested to her that we use high order thinking competitions for our high achievers, but she refused. She insisted that a spelling bee would bring out the high achievers. She printed lists of words for students to memorize. The spelling bee drew to the final rounds as many students who were receiving special education support as high achievers.
The first activity of our new high achievement program was limited to the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy. High order cognitive successes were not even an option. Students would not be given a chance to create anything, or to figure out anything on their own. Just two years prior students in this school had completed projects that made adults say "Wow, this is college level work!" and "This work is so impressive I would hire these students over most adults." Now, success was to be limited to spelling the most words correctly. Our school's standards for success had dropped to their lowest level in the history of the school.
More test scores more innumerate decisions
After we received the student scores from the state writing test, we had a big meeting to discuss the results. The curriculum coordinator said that most of those who failed might have passed had their spelling and punctuation been better. (Bloom's Level 1&2) Another teacher responded by pointing out that students who failed could have gotten significantly more points towards passing had their reasoning and self-expression been better (higher order thinking.)
This discussion epitomized what was happening all around the school. We were being instructed to teach at low cognitive levels using time time and resources that had formerly been dedicated to high level successes. Our input that the numbers did not support these decisions was being ignored outright.
At the end of the year, after our students had all taken their End of Grade tests (EOGs), our testing coordinator announced at a staff meeting that our students had a high pass rate. The entire staff cheered.
This good news indicated that we would continue to receive state and federal funding, but our response suggested we were all prone to serious oversights. The pass rate constitutes a measure of success for our lowest performing students only. The performance of our average and high performing students had no bearing on the pass rate. Since 2/3 of our students were not in danger of failing the EOGs, the pass rate did not provide any information about their performance. I congratulated the special education teachers for their successes, but pondered the evidence that we were now actually working our above average students at lower levels than we had in the past. Placing our emphasis on getting low achievers to pass tests seemed to have undermined our focus on promoting mastery and achievement.
Part 3: No we will NOT follow high standards for our high achievers
Introduction: When I switched careers from engineering to teaching, my math methods instructor said that the problem with math education in America is that the curriculum is set by those who are not good at math, those who don't really understand what math means and how it can be used. Those of us who are good at math accept these low standards, and don't say anything.
I knew what he meant. I had spent 6 years creating mathematically intensive firmware. I had solved complex problems that took hours to weeks to solve. I had done independent research in pure and applied mathematics. I had spent my life watching adults, who had gotten high grades in math, demonstrate an inability to interpret simple numeric information in the news, or even in their own finances. I knew that what we emphasize in American math classes is not what people will really need to understand. At each school I that I would later work I would prove to be the highest educated in math of the entire staff. But I would come to find that my input on math education would not affect the decisions being made. Test scores of low level skills would trump real understanding every time.
Numeracy:
Planning meeting disagreement
In the year that we started MAP testing, I realized that our school had a unique opportunity. We had a few very high performing 7th grade students going into 8th. They were highly independent learners who loved to prove themselves on complex projects. They demonstrated high level cognition. However, they did have some problems with low level knowledge and skills.
At our year-end planning session I boldly proposed that we follow our Mission Statement and Design Principles by offering our high achievers a class that would focus on complex expeditionary projects high on Bloom's Taxonomy. I reminded those at the meeting that doing so would be consistent with our Mission Statement, our Design Principles, the high levels of the NCTM Standards, and the philosophy of inquiry based learning. These students gave our school a unique opportunity to work to all the highest standards. I discussed the difference between working at high cognitive levels and accelerating through low level standards.
I also pointed out that having a math projects class instead of an accelerated math class would offer us more flexibility in how we work with our students. We would have more room to address the holes in our students' low level knowledge. We would be able to switch students between sections as the need arose. We would be more able to address the specific needs and interests of our high achievers. We would be able to demonstrate our ability to rise to the challenges of student-centered expeditionary learning that we promised to families in our Mission Statement and Design Principles.
Acceleration Vs High Standards high level achievement
- ELS Design Principles
- NCTM Standards
- AAAS Project 2061
- Inquiry-Based Learning
Accusation of bad attitude
In response to my plea to work our high achievers to the highest standards possible, I was called into the directors office. The curriculum coordinator suggested that I should be fired for my "bad attitude." They told me that the school was going to offer accelerated math and I would have to either adjust or leave. I was quite baffled that our director and curriculum coordinator would call high standards, our school's own Mission Statement and Design Principles, "a bad attitude."
Our students had risen to the top of their class because they were independent learners good at reasoning, problem solving, and project based learning. For years they had worked high on Bloom's Taxonomy. Their teachers had given them complex projects to complete. But now, as very high achieving 8th-graders, they would be required to follow a curriculum that was designed for average 10th-graders, and tested for below average 10th-graders. After years of high cognitive successes they would be required to follow a curriculum racing through skills low on Bloom's Taxonomy.
Confirmation by colleague
That summer one of my colleagues had to take a course in best practices in education. He came back from his class saying, "What they taught in that course was exactly what Karl had said in that meeting - almost verbatim!" Although I felt validated to once again hear that the experts in best practices agreed with what I had learned from both my experience using math, and my experience teaching math. I would still not be allowed to teach my high achieving students to those high standards. The decision had already been made by somebody who was not trained in math standards. Our school would proceed with accelerated math as mandated. High level math would not be an option.
Boredom of students punctuated by small interesting projects
Over the course of the school year, my students, now in Algebra 2, expressed discouragement at being raced through so many low-level, meaningless skills. They would ask me, "When are we ever going to use this information?" I would ask them what they intended to do as adults. With none intending to work in science or engineering, I would respond truthfully, "Other than your college entrance exam, you are not going to use this specific information again." They would ask why they had to learn it then. I would respond, "Because the decision has already been made and we are required by law to follow through." I wasn't going to lie to them. Having to comply with decisions that have already been made is a real life lesson..
We took about three breaks from the low-level skills demanded by the state curriculum to have brief high level discussions. On one day, I put the equations of the Lorentz Transformation from Relativity Theory on the board. We discussed the implications. Unlike most adults, the students demonstrated understanding, interest, and excitement and even asked questions about the implications of this theory faster than we could discuss them. I was very happy with their ability to demonstrate such high level understanding. But at the end of those few days of high level discussions my students would say, "This was the best class we have had. Can we have more discussions like this?" I would have to respond, "No, we are required to get through all the material mandated by the state before the End of Year test, so we won't have time for more discussions like this." Although they had the ability to rise to these very high discussions, we were not allowed to spend real time working at their level of ability and interest. We were required to race through low level material.
The testing simulation
In the spirit of inquiry-based learning, I decided to make cause of their discouragement, test scores, one of our few diversions from mandated curriculum. We created blank multiple choice forms of 10 questions with 5 choices each. We asked 80 students to fill in bubbles as if they were taking a multiple choice test. We created an "answer key," graded the "tests" and compiled the results. Only 3 students out of 80 missed all 10 questions. 2 students got 7 "correct." The bulk of students got about 3 out of 10 "correct."
We used these results to discuss how random chance factors will affect multiple choice tests. From that understanding, we conjectured what other non-knowledge based factors would affect the outcome of multiple choice tests. We discussed what implications this simulation had for real multiple choice tests. In just two class periods, I was now confident that my students could demonstrate understanding of intrinsic precision problems in testing.
This simulation demonstrated the distinction between knowledge and understanding - low level learning vs. high-level learning. My students had not yet studied standard deviation or r-value but they could fully keep up with a conversation about the implications of statistical distributions. In contrast, the inability of some staff members to demonstrate the same understanding hampered our school's discussion of testing precision. My students had high understanding, even with low knowledge. This contrasted the problem that hindered our staff discussions: high knowledge with low understanding. This is exactly the challenge of education. Understanding can lurch forward with minimal knowledge. Knowledge does not guarantee understanding.
Random Chance in Multiple Choices Tests
Summation:
The school has switched focus from mastery achievement to low level knowledge and skills. This change was motivated and reinforced by standardized testing. During this time, the school has hired extremely brilliant young teachers. The number of students failing tests has decreased and the behavior of middle school students has improved. A casual observer might say that the school has improved.
Yet, in the years before testing, adults looked at the 7th and 8th grade student work and said, "Wow, this work is so high quality I would be willing to hire these students over most adults!" Now, people look at student work and say, "This looks like really great 8th grade work." Or they say, "The passing rate is really high this year." Overall, middle school students are better behaved now, but demonstrate less ability to take on projects independently than the students before testing. Students now demonstrate less ability to support each other than the pre-testing students did. The state's official measures of success says that the school is doing better. But the real quality of student achievement is now lower. In the last year, some parents have expressed to teachers, "Your school looks great on paper, but you don't actually do any of the things your advertising says."
Parents now express frustration over test scores. They see their child's MAP test score drop and they ask the teachers why this has happened. Teachers correctly respond, "It is a precision problem with the test. It happened to a lot of kids." The answer is correct, but it does not satisfy the parents. Parents find it too hard to believe that a school would invest that much time, energy, and resources into a test, publish the results, and then claim that the results are meaningless because the precision of the test is too low. But that is, in fact, what is happening.
High stakes testing drove our school to make counterproductive choices. Before testing we were encouraged to treat all students as if they were capable of high cognition and self-directed achievement. After testing were were ordered to treat all students as low performers who depended on us to acquire knowledge. This lowering of standards is being repeated at thousands of schools all over America.
Purpose of standardized testing
Footnote to Parents: Does your school emphasize that your child get high test scores, or that your child demonstrates high achievement? They're not the same. Does your school have accelerated programs or high achievement programs? They're not the same. Does your school help your child learn how to learn, or teach facts for the test? Testable knowledge is not the same as habits of success for life. Does your school use the same standards for high achievers as low, only faster? Or, do they recognize that the needs of the low and high are structurally different?
Has your child been placed in a program (low or high) based on test scores alone? Can your school administrators validate the reliability of the test results? Does the program meet the needs of your child, or the needs of the test? The needs might not be the same. Your child's teachers probably want to help your child achieve at his highest possible level, but that administrative rules they must follow don't support the teacher in doing so, and testing requirements discourage the teacher from doing so.
The story above, along with the linked notes, demonstrates how test scores can be misleading, how curriculum, particularly test driven curriculum, can fail to support the needs of most children.
Footnote to Teachers: Have you been ordered to lower your standards for the sake of test scores? Have you noticed student interest decline as emphasis on test scores rose? Have you noticed students become more dependent as emphasis on test scores replace opportunities to understand and to create?
Footnote to Employers: You asked us to raise our standards. You said that workers need to be able to take on challenges independently and work cooperatively. You said graduates needed real skills for real work. Do you see schools now producing independent highly skilled workers, or more dependent less skilled workers? Is the emphasis on arbitrary knowledge instead of achievement helping graduates arrive ready to achieve?
Footnote to Voters: Federal and state laws have imposed standardized tests on all students with the threat that funding would be based on how many students pass. The obvious consequence has been that schools are eliminating programs that offer students chances for real success, and they are replacing those programs with test skill programs. Schools are channeling resources that once helped average and above average students achieve into programs that help below average students pass tests. The story above is mild compared to stories in schools all over America. Remember this next time you vote.
These images are so well known they appear in the popular images of our fiction.
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