Pseudostandards Revisited
Andrew Rotherham offers more thoughts and links on the question of pseudostandards and No Child Left Behind. Obviously, the political prospects for a single nationwide test don't look very good (when you add up the liberals who don't like tests and the conservatives who don't like uniform national policy, there aren't a ton of people left) but I don't really see any other way to straighten this out over the long term. The inter-state cooperation approach could work in theory, but it seems to me that the incentives basically point in the wrong direction for this to actually happen.
Advertisement
Comments (6)
My attitude toward this is the same as toward the Iraq war: if you've got a promising sounding idea that depends on first achieving some impossible precondition, then you shouldn't do it.
I don't believe the necessary conditions exist in the US today for having helpful high-stakes tests based on sensible national standards. We can talk about all the good things we could do if it were possible, but the consequences of pretending it's possible, when it isn't, are pretty bad.
October 11, 2005 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obviously, the political prospects for a single nationwide test don't look very good...
Thank God!
The theory of the the No Child Left Behind fantasy is that we can 'test' our way to success. It is one more simplistic, over promised approach to a very complex problem. Applying a 'test' standard to all the woes of the public schools, and then pretending that you have solved the myriad of issues surrounding the public school system is simply the most stunningly assinine thing we have witnessed.
Beyond the obvious limitations of testing, they are a 'snap shot in time' and they assess a very limited scope of the curriculum being taught, normative group testing provides no diagnostic qualities to assist in improving student achievment.
The other real weakness in 'testing our way to success' is that it simply sets the table for cheating. Whether it be 'holding students back' so they don't ever take the test, or teaching directly to the test, cheating becomes a real concern. When financial incentives are 'tied to test scores' you can bet, test scores will get better. Does that mean higher achievement? In some cases yes, in others, a resounding no.
While NCLB is expensive, and certainly underfunded, it is a much less expensive approach than real educational reform. The feds need to incentivize real reforms, that the states can opt in or out of, depending on their priorities. But to create any kind of nationwide, manditory, normed test to determine academent achievement is both useless in regards to actual student achievement and wasteful of our educational dollars.
October 11, 2005 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm ambivalent about the usefulness ot standardized tests, but if you're going to have them, then every one should take the same national test at the same time. I believe the reason you'll never see a national test is that only one state will be #1 and you'll have ten states exposed as being in the bottom 20%. As things currently stand, states are free to create their own tests which can be modified until the states are able to show they are making some kind of measurable progess.
October 11, 2005 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obviously, the political prospects for a single nationwide test don't look very good (when you add up the liberals who don't like tests and the conservatives who don't like uniform national policy, there aren't a ton of people left) but I don't really see any other way to straighten this out over the long term.
1> I don't see how you get people to want the feds to pay even more money for education without some reasonable measure of results.
2> I don't see why the states would be much interested in highlighting the fact that a given state's educational system might suck swampwater.
I remember sitting in an administrative office of a large school district with someone who explained to me that educational 'fashions' come around every three years. They'd get excited about this new, exciting scheme, start implementing it, and right about the time they've got the kinks worked out (three years) they run off to implement a new scheme. This was while sitting next to another section who had this thing going where they would file for a federal grant for new computers; the point of doing that was so they could use the new computers to more efficiently file for more grant money. (To do what? No idea! Something about special ed.)
ash
['Who me? Cynical?']
October 11, 2005 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
It isn't just that the states get to make up their own tests based on national standards. That alone would create the pseudo standards. What actually happens is that different states use different TYPES of test as well. Tests can be either norm referenced (comparing a student to an average) or criterion referenced (comparing a student's work to a standard). Tests can also be either knowledge assessments (what does a student know?) or performance assessments (what can a student do?).
In Washington State, we use the WASL, which is a criterion referenced performance assessment. Essentially, it asks can a student read, understand the reading, and find evidence in a text. It asks can a student write a narrative account or an expository description clearly, with correct grammar and punctuation. It asks can a student solve mathematical problems and describe in words how they arrived at the answer. All of these are performances. It actually isn't a bad test. We want to know if students can do these things.
To avoid pseudo standards there has to be some consistency. The question for me is at which level do we need to know what a standardized test tells us? National? State? District? School? Grade level?
October 11, 2005 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
October 11, 2005 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink