How Incompetent Tests Are Terrifying 3rd Graders
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The "embarrassing truth" for Tulsa World editor Mike Strain is that he missed two of the six sample questions on the test that Oklahoma 3rd graders must pass to be promoted. The embarrassing truth for society is that we are stressing our children, so some vomit on their tests or wet their pants, and teaching them to dread school. The embarrassing truth that school reformers should face is that they imposed a heartbreaking and doomed testing regime without having a clue about what they were doing.
The test question says, "The pelican dives and scoops more than three gallons of fish and water in one gulp ..." The newspaper editor (and I) read that as saying that the bird took the fish in one "grab." (The supposedly better answer was "swallow.")
Similarly, the first sentence of the reading passage tells children the fact that the pelican is "one of the best fishermen in the world." But, a 3rd grader who trusted the adult who wrote the passage could be flunked if he answered (like Strain and I did) that that is a statement of fact.
Of course, these are just two of a series of embarrassingly bad test questions spawned by the punitive testing mania. Last year, nationally, the controversies centered on the infamous "Pineapple question" and similar absurdities. The Oklahoma Department of Education is different from other systems that are experimenting on children only in that it issued a novel reply. Such questions apparently aren't unfair to 3rd graders because they can read the Standard which the questions are assessing!?!?
It is especially hard to figure out what Oklahoma reformers think these tests are supposed to accomplish - other than take pounds of flesh out of supposedly How Incompetent Tests Are Terrifying 3rd Graders | John Thompson: