Standardized Testing and Pearson's Dangerous Game!
Re-post from a Jason Stanford of The Texas Observer.
If you haven't figured out yet that education "reform" with its Standards and Testing mania is BIG BUSINESS check this out. Pearson Publishing (and all it's subsidiaries and holdings) are reportedly having a difficult time lately (see follow up article). The new Common Core testing, textbook and resource contracts are crucial to its continued $$$$ success. This story tells what happens when someone makes a serious challenge to the efficacy of claims that standardized testing us the end all and be all of education reform.
If you haven't figured out yet that education "reform" with its Standards and Testing mania is BIG BUSINESS check this out. Pearson Publishing (and all it's subsidiaries and holdings) are reportedly having a difficult time lately (see follow up article). The new Common Core testing, textbook and resource contracts are crucial to its continued $$$$ success. This story tells what happens when someone makes a serious challenge to the efficacy of claims that standardized testing us the end all and be all of education reform.
Mute the Messenger
When Dr. Walter Stroup showed that Texas’ standardized testing regime is flawed, the testing company struck back.
Rebellions sometimes begin slowly, and Walter Stroup had to wait almost seven hours to start his. The setting was a legislative hearing at the Texas Capitol in the summer of 2012 at which the growing opposition to high-stakes standardized testing in Texas public schools was about to come to a head. Stroup, a University of Texas professor, was there to testify, but there was a long line of witnesses ahead of him. For hours he waited patiently, listening to everyone else struggle to explain why 15 years of standardized testing hadn’t improved schools. Stroup believed he had the answer.
Using standardized testing as the yardstick to measure our children’s educational growth wasn’t new in Texas. But in the summer of 2012 people had discovered a brand-new reason to be pissed off about it. “Rigor” was the new watchword in education policy. Testing advocates believed that more rigorous curricula and tests would boost student achievement—the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. But that’s not how it worked out. In fact, more than a few sank. More than one-third of the statewide high school class of 2015 has already failed at least one of the newly implemented STAAR tests, disqualifying them from graduation without a successful re-test. As often happens, moms got mad.
As happens less often, they got organized, and they got results.
As happens less often, they got organized, and they got results.
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott, long an advocate of using tests to hold schools accountable, broke from Geaux Teacher!: Standardized Testing and Pearson's Dangerous Game!: