Tests Don’t Assess What Really Matters
Leonie Haimson, a New York City public school parent, is the executive director of Class Size Matters, a citywide advocacy group.
UPDATED JULY 29, 2012, 7:06 PM
Campbell's Law predicts that any time huge stakes are attached to quantitative data, the data itself will become inherently unreliable and distorted through cheating and gaming the system. In the New York City public schools, the overemphasis on standardized testing has led to test score inflation and numerous cheating scandals. Precious resources are diverted to for-profit testing companies, and learning time is lost as students spend weeks preparing for the tests, and teachers are pulled out of the classroom for days at a time to score them. Meanwhile school budgets are scraped to the bone and class sizes are rising. In New York City, class sizes in the early grades are the largest in 13 years.
The new federal mandate that teachers be judged at least in part on how well student test scores have risen is exacerbating this trend. Schools with the greatest numbers