Unless Teachers Write the Tests, They Won't Improve Anything
Ezekiel Emanuel argues that more tests make students smarter, a proposition which is not as simple as it sounds. The validity of his claim comes down to such questions as "who writes the tests," "how quickly are the results reported," and "how are the scores used."
In short, we need fewer standardized tests. For the purposes Emanuel desires, today's standardized tests are useless. All are normed on a bell curve, and the results reflect the student's family income with uncanny accuracy. The SAT has become a measure of how much a student's family is able to pay for tutoring. Like all repetitive test preparation, practicing for the SAT raises test scores, but it doesn't mean the student is better educated or likelier to retain the material that was engorged for the test.
What he really admires, and appropriately so, are the regular weekly tests that he took in high school chemistry. His chemistry teacher Mr. Koontz knew what he had taught. He tested the students on what they had learned. He knew by the end of the day or over the weekend which students were keeping up and which ones were falling behind. He could act on that knowledge immediately to make sure that students understood what he thought he had taught and to explain it again to those who did not. He also learned whether to adjust his style of teaching to communicate the concepts and facts of chemistry more clearly to students. Mr. Koontz used the tests
