The Test: Bad News (civil rights facade) and Good News (local accountability)
So do you want the good news or the bad news first? It’s a question my parents often asked me a child growing up. Which do you want to hear first? I’ll start with the bad news. High states testing has been around for a long time (See the post After Thousand of Years, #China Changing Mind on #Testing ? #edreform). Historically, the task of the test has been to sort people for their roles in society (See the post Walking Away From High Stakes Tests, A Noble Lie). Only recently has the argument been made that we can test to “identity low-performing schools” or to “close the achievement gap.” This retread of arguments onto the long standing practice of testing has been quite clever and became national policy with the No Child Left Behind Act imported from the Texas by President George W. Bush and former Secretary of Education Rod Paige 
(See the peer reviewed paper Accountability Texas-style: The progress and learning of urban minority students in a high-stakes testing context)
(See the peer reviewed paper Accountability Texas-style: The progress and learning of urban minority students in a high-stakes testing context)The national media is now finally paying attention to the debate about the value of high-stakes testing. This morning, The Diane Rehm Show hosted an hour long discussion with,
- Anya Kamenetz education reporter for NPR and author of “The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But You Don’t Have to Be”
- Elaine Weiss national coordinator of the Broader Bolder Approach to Education
- Matthew Chingos senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and research director of its Brown Center on Education Policy
- Chanelle Hardy senior vice president for policy and executive director of the National Urban League Washington Bureau
Anya and Weiss thoughtfully critiqued our current system of high-stakes testing required by No Child Left Behind.
Some “reformers” often want us to ignore effects/results/reality poverty in public policy and more specifically education policy…but…
Hardy (a former Teach For America corps member— I had a gut feeling that this was the case after listening to her comments and a quick Google confirmed this. Ever notice TFA corps members are everywhere but the classroom? To me how they choose to use their TFA-given power and platform after they leave the classroom is very important. Some use it for ill and some for good) and Chingos basically said lets keep high-stakes testing. I didn’t really hear any alternatives to the current top-down testing structure in their conversation. In fact Hardy, offered the common refrain that if we don’t “desegregate testing data” it will suddenly be a mystery which schools and students are The Test: Bad News (civil rights facade) and Good News (local accountability) | Cloaking Inequity:
