Testing + Reward/Punishment = High Stakes Testing
One would think that if little to no improvement was made from the No Child Left Behind program, that the Department of Education, specifically Arne Duncan, would reflect on that and not instead push his Race to the Top program which is simply NCLB on steroids.
The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, on the value of high stakes testing and is discussed in an article in Education Week.
Below is an excerpt.
Dora
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.
“Too often it’s taken for granted that the test being used for the incentive is itself the marker of