Standardized Testing is not Teaching

Trying to Hit a Moving Target

Notice in this exchange how Merryl Tisch keeps moving the goalposts, first claiming the purpose of testing is to provide teachers and parents with information.  When that didn't work, she moved on to a new argument.  This is what I have observed repeatedly from supporters of testing.  The same failed arguments recycled again and again. Click read more to view video.

Misleading Parents and Gagging Teachers

One of the more pernicious aspects of the Common Core/Smarter Balanced roll-out is the marketing strategy employed to mislead parents.  State departments of education and school districts have become marketers for test-makers, spouting talking points fed to them by the same company, Pearson, that stands to profit from test-based accountability systems.  Teachers are threatened with disciplinary action if they criticize the tests or point parents and students to information about their rights.  This has led to critics of testing to go underground, surreptitiously distributing information, sometimes at great personal risk.  There is something wrong with an educational policy that causes the promulgation of information to be dangerous.

Debunking SBAC Rationales

1.  Smarter Balanced Tests are Better than old OAKS.

You've probably heard it: the old standards and OAKS test relied on rote memorization but the Common Core and SBAC encourage "deeper" thinking.  Interestingly, this latter claim is based on the observation that there are fewer Common Core standards than before.  Some critics have pointed out that in many cases, multiple standards have just been condensed into one.  But even if we accept that the Common Core itself might encourage deeper thinking, the idea that the SBAC remedies past problems with the OAKS because it does not rely solely on multiple choice questions is deeply flawed.  First, SBAC still has a substantial multiple choice portion, so that problem has not been eliminated.  Second, the written portion of the SBAC introduces new levels of complication.  For example, who will grade the written sections?  It will take thousands of people to score these items and each person will have different ways of scoring.  Inter-rater reliability is difficult to establish and requires levels of quality control to verify.  In fact, not relying on multiple choice items lessens our ability to compare scores, a major justification for imposing interstate testing in the first place.