What Kindergartners Might Teach Us About Test-Based Accountability
There is an ongoing debate about widespread administration of standardized tests to kindergartners. This is of course a serious decision. My personal opinion about whether this is a good idea depends on several factors, such as how good the tests will be and, most importantly, how the results will be used (and I cannot say that I am optimistic about the latter).
Although the policy itself must be considered seriously on its merits, there is one side aspect of testing kindergarteners that fascinates me: It would demonstrate how absurd it is to judge school performance, as does NCLB, using absolute performance levels – i.e., how highly students score on tests, rather than their progress over time.
Basically, the kindergarten tests would inevitably shake out the same way as those administered in later grades. Schools and districts serving more disadvantaged students would score substantially lower than their counterparts in more affluent areas. If the scores were converted to proficiency rates or similar cut-score measures, they would show extremely low pass rates in urban districts such as Detroit.
A thought experiment: I would be very curious to see whether the same ill-informed advocates who use absolute performance measures to deem some schools and districts “low-performing” or “high-performing” would do the same with the kindergarten results. I’m pretty sure they would not, for obvious reasons: These tests would have been administered to students in their first year of formal K-12 schooling (perhaps even at the beginning of that year). And there would be no plausible way to attribute the testing results to the quality of schools’ educational services, since kindergartners would not yet have had the benefit of receiving these services.
Rather, they would have entered the schooling system at a certain level of performance (at least to the degree that tests could actually measure it). Some of them would be way ahead of others, and these discrepanciesShanker Blog » What Kindergartners Might Teach Us About Test-Based Accountability: