Five absurdities about high-stakes standardized tests
Barely a day goes by when the education world isn’t treated to some new story involving high-stakes standardized tests, the chief metric of “accountability systems” in the modern era of school reform.It might be about how student test scores went up or down or all around; about how standardized tests were incorrectly scored by giant companies that make millions from testing contracts; that some questions on the test don’t make any sense; that the high stakes being attached to the results — which are being used to evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools, districts and states — have gone from being unfair to preposterous.
Against this backdrop, here are five absurdities about all of the current standardized testing frenzy. Feel free to add your own and I can publish a more complete list.
1. Teachers are being evaluated on the test scores of students they never had and subjects they don’t teach.
This sounds like a fantasy, but alas, it is not. A number of states have passed laws requiring that teachers be evaluated in part (often in large part) by standardized test scores — but, most subjects don’t yet have standardized tests on which to attach high stakes. So complicated (and invalid) formulas are used to devise how teachers who don’t teach math and English are judged by the test scores of teachers who do.
In Florida, for example, legislators just passed a law making it illegal to evaluate