Twisted Validity: Guilting Parents to “Opt” Kids to Test in Order to Save Teachers and School
Test validity concerns how well a test measures what it is actually supposed to measure.
As such, student achievement tests should be confined to measuring student achievement– not for grading teachers and schools. It really is that simple.
Nevertheless.
The validity issue has been completely ignored with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and with the Obama/Duncan NCLB waivers, and with both Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorizations currently in theHouse and Senate.
All of this works for those wielding the high-stakes-testing power wand and raking in financial rewards because of what I will term “the compartmentalized beauty for ed reform.” Here is how it works related to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) assessment appendage, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test:
1. PARCC assessment vendor, Pearson, can make a test and call it a student assessment based upon CCSS.
2. Federal or state legislation can mandate that the student assessment scores are to be used to measure individuals who d not complete the tests, such as teachers, or even entities, such as schools.
3. Pearson can offer individualized score reports; consolidated reports on schools, districts, states, or even the entire (dwindling) PARCC consortium. And since Pearson is not offering reports that directly pass judgment on non-testers (teachers, schools), then even though the company knows that its individualized student tests are to be used to pass high-stakes judgment on non-testers, it need not pay any attention to it.
4. Those wielding test driven reform (lawmakers, policy pushers) are not readily held responsible for violating test validity because if stupidity is written into the law, that somehow makes the violation non-existent.
5. Meanwhile, the actual test takers– the students– have undue pressure placed on them to carry both teacher careers and school destinies upon their young backs.
You see, in our little American education top-down “reform” hierarchy, as one goes down the chain and moves farther away from the non-classroomed– the legislators, policy opiners, and education profiteers– responsibility increases and power Twisted Validity: Guilting Parents to “Opt” Kids to Test in Order to Save Teachers and School | deutsch29:
