Five Recommendations For Reporting On (Or Just Interpreting) State Test Scores
From my experience, education reporters are smart, knowledgeable, and attentive to detail. That said, the bulk of the stories about testing data – in big cities and suburbs, in this year and in previous years – could be better.
Listen, I know it’s unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object – such as calling proficiency rates “scores” – are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone’s interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal.
Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick
Listen, I know it’s unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object – such as calling proficiency rates “scores” – are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone’s interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal.
Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick