Bob Shepherd: The Hoax of Standardized Testing
Bob Shepherd is an editor, author, and recently retired teacher in Florida. He worked for many years as a developer of curriculum and assessments. He posted this comment here.
Combating Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs)
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in that industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the standardization procedures used, in the past, with intelligence tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and so on. The mathematics tests are marginally better than are the tests in ELA, US History, and Science, but they are not great. The tests in English Language Arts are truly appalling. A few comments:
The state and national standardized tests in ELA are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists of world CONTINUE READING: Bob Shepherd: The Hoax of Standardized Testing | Diane Ravitch's blog