Teaching to the Wrong Tests
OCTOBER 13, 2013
California students are thankfully done with the old Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program, and for better or worse, are moving on to the Common Core aligned Smarter Balanced assessments. The change results from the passage of AB 484 in this past legislative session. Certain education reform advocates have concerns about the lack of accountability that will result from abandoning one testing regimen before the other is fully operational. Those concerns assume the prior notion of “accountability” was working, which I’d suggest it is not really the case; the old tests were so weak and the stakes so high that we did students and schools a disservice to spend time focused on those tests. (To be fair, no law dictated to schools or teachers that they should raise scores by teaching to the test and engaging in test prep, but it was a rather predictable outcome; policy makers at many levels have exacerbated those problems for years even, with the evidence available to