Anonymous Test: Education Techniques

Math And Science Dept: Standardized means the same for everybody, set by a central authority a government department or private company. But kids aren t the same. A test can tell you what a kid scores, not what the score means for the kid. It depends on where s/he started from, what his abilities are and what s important for her to know. A low mark for one kid might be a better sign than a high mark for another. Teachers know this and can adjust the lesson and the mark s meaning to the learner. But anonymous test scorers can t. So standardized tests are poor indicators of how kids and teachers are doing, according to The Star. This is done by obtaining widely distributed test copies in advance and giving them to kids, shifting pass/fail levels on tests at state or local levels to meet criteria for receiving federal funds, faking results or counselling out weaker students by pressuring them to leave school on a variety of pretexts so the school or class average rises. All this is documented in U.S. education historian Diane Ravitch s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System . She gets credibility because she served as an assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush, bringing in and arguing for standardized tests and if your kid recently soldiered through Ontario s province-wide EQAO tests for reading, math and science, in Grades 3, 6 or 9, then you ve been part of a worldwide homogenization of education techniques. This kind of testing is meant less to measure how kids are doing than how their teachers and schools are doing, so they can be held accountable. Now there s nothing wrong with accountability. And testing is a necessary tool. The problem is accountability based on high-stakes, standardized tests. It gets worse when you tack the accountability piece onto standardized testing, as they ve done all over the U.S. It may seem plausible and clear-cut. But when test scores become the basis for rewards and punishments like hiring, firing, teacher pay and school funding or closing, the tests grow vulnerable to, and even create an incentive for, cheating or gaming the system. As reported in the news.
@t diane ravitch, poor indicators