The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap
Deborah Meier responds to Fordham Institute's Michael J. Petrilli today.
Dear Mike,
The data you present re. the "achievement gap" is consistent with an argument I made against using standardized testing as a barometer 50 years ago. I said (and wrote) that as long as our testing system requires us to rank order we will be tracking income (and wealth), not education. As one becomes less equal, so will the other. Anything else would not meet psychometric standards! The tests are designed by test publishers who, by pre-testing items, can be sure that they've got the "right"—reliable and credible—rank order.
Once one concludes, as I did through 50 years of close observation, that the tests are measuring something other than "reading" skill—decoding and restating—our problem looks different. Yes, E.D. Hirsch is right: You can't measure reading qua reading. I not merely observed but ran little mini-focus groups to understand why some kids got "right" answers and others "wrong" ones. It had little to do with their reading skill.
Read Part 2 of In Schools We Trust and you'll learn what I discovered was happening. It's partly a question of vocabulary, but more importantly it is in their "interpretations" that the poor and rich (and probably black and
Dear Mike,
The data you present re. the "achievement gap" is consistent with an argument I made against using standardized testing as a barometer 50 years ago. I said (and wrote) that as long as our testing system requires us to rank order we will be tracking income (and wealth), not education. As one becomes less equal, so will the other. Anything else would not meet psychometric standards! The tests are designed by test publishers who, by pre-testing items, can be sure that they've got the "right"—reliable and credible—rank order.
Once one concludes, as I did through 50 years of close observation, that the tests are measuring something other than "reading" skill—decoding and restating—our problem looks different. Yes, E.D. Hirsch is right: You can't measure reading qua reading. I not merely observed but ran little mini-focus groups to understand why some kids got "right" answers and others "wrong" ones. It had little to do with their reading skill.
Read Part 2 of In Schools We Trust and you'll learn what I discovered was happening. It's partly a question of vocabulary, but more importantly it is in their "interpretations" that the poor and rich (and probably black and