CURMUDGUCATION: What Do We Want To Measure When We Get Back?

CURMUDGUCATION: What Do We Want To Measure When We Get Back?

What Do We Want To Measure When We Get Back?

I have railed against this for years, but now it's apparently time to take the railing up a notch.

Lots of folks are worried about--or at least pretending to be worried about--the notion that students may lose a step or two during the coronahiatus, and that's reasonable concern. Every teacher knows that September, not April, is the cruelest month, the month in which you discover just how much information just sort of fell out of students' heads under the warm summer sun. This pandemic pause is undoubtedly going to set some educational goals back.

Coronadonuts?

But which goals? Exactly what kind of ground do we think we're going to lose?

Cue all the folks who like to treat "student achievement" and "test score" as synonyms. Here, for instance, is a paper from the folks at testing company NWEA projecting what the COVID-19 Slide (which would be a good name for a dance) will look like. As a piece of research, it is really, really scrambling to be anything better than a best guess, and while I don't fault them for that, because what else can anyone do except make a best guess, NWEA's people have buried their guess under layers of language like this--

To provide preliminary estimates of the potential impacts of the extended pause of academic CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: What Do We Want To Measure When We Get Back?