“… And now there is something new that can skew a classroom’s and school’s results: kids who deliberately do poorly either because they know they have no personal stake in it or because they are protesting the tests. If you don’t think this dynamic is real or important, take a look at what just happened at a leading high school in Washington.” …
My D teaches in NJ and while I am not against some objective measurement being used to evaluate teachers there has to be a process that insures students are taking the test seriously.
A very good but demanding teacher could easily be negatively impacted by a small group of students purposely bombing the test to get even.
You could also have students protect a favored teacher by bombing the initial test so that the teacher shows great progress when they take it for real at the end of the year.
Following a complete failure by Measurement, Inc., Tennessee “suspended” the tests. Then, the state told districts that they’d have to schedule the tests again for high school students. My county’s superintendent basically said “no, we’re not messing up our instructional time for this” but the state said “but you have to or we’ll sue you”. The superintendent likes not getting sued, so he issued an apology to the students (“sorry you have to do this. I don’t like it either”) and scheduled the tests for the first week of AP exams. It was literally the only time that would work.
We were told that 90% attendance was mandatory. However, there were only seven students present for my biology test. My English class had so few people that we shared a room with another English class. Nobody deliberately flunked it. Some people just stared at the unopened booklet for a few hours.
I’ve heard that the PARCC is basically useless and eats up a few weeks of instructional time. Why would any state use it?
I happen to be of the school that standardized tests are a disaster area, I don’t care how you write them, how you create them, the intent, or at least the level of importance they have gained. Standardized tests by their very nature can be gamed, every rewrite of the SAT has shown that they can be prepped for, that students can gain an advantage by prepping for them. The AP, once a measure of advanced knowledge (taking the equivalent of a semester college course in a year) where you would study the equivalent of first semester college chem for example, is now a class from what I can tell to learn enough to score highly on the test itself.
The problem with these tests is like teachers being encouraged to dump homework on kids, it is ‘proof’ of effectiveness that can be ‘measured’, because alternate forms of measurement take more work and detailed observation. So they come up with some test designed by some consultants that supposedly show the kid has learned, it is being used to evaluate the teacher, so they teach to the test, anything not on the test is therefore "not important’, and so forth. I think the worse thing I have seen is these tests that supposedly can test for creativity and innovation, from what i can tell they are just more of the same, where you can teach kids to do well on these tests, and from what studies have been done so far tracking the kids who did well on these tests, they don’t show any appreciably higher level of creativity and innovation than kids who did less on the tests.
The real problem is no one has found an easy, cheap way to see if kids really are thinking, personally I think something like the Fermi math kind of thing they do with kids in middle school, where the thought process and imagination are the key, not the ‘right’ answer, is a lot more critical, and more importantly, you can’t game them. Standardized tests are a big business, for those who write the tests, to the companies that prep for them, the schools that can justify their budget by pointing out how many AP classes they offer, and that alone should make people think whether these are being done for the benefit of kids or are they being done for the benefit of others, schools that can more easily justify a budget, parents who see everything in test scores and hierarchy, and the massive test creation and prep industry?
hmmm… I went to that HS in Washington, of course that was many years ago. Apparently many high performing kids spent little time on the standardized test or skipped it entirely (a test which has no direct effect on their lives) so that they could attend AP classes or study for AP tests.(tests which can determine college acceptances) Very logical behavior.
Incredibly poor planning by school administrators to have standardized testing that conflicts with AP exams and AP exam prep. Students who blew it off made the right call.
Wackiness like this is one reason why some families opt to homeschool.
In my own state, PARCC testing is creating huge debate. Our governor is a strong proponent of it and many families and teachers are strongly against it. And it takes up a large chuck of the academic calendar (the prep time and the actual testing time) the students are the real losers in this. The government is trying to make this test mandatory (and they want to tie money to this test) but it is doing nothing to actually help students learn so it’s become quite a fight.
My kids grew up taking the MCAS, the only standardized test that met the criteria laid out in the No Child Left Behind legislation that spawned this madness. It was still ridiculous, especially for schools that were already doing very well, because it got to a point where you couldn’t keep getting better scores every year, so you’d get the dread “failure to make adequate yearly progress” designation, even if 97% of your students were testing proficient or advanced.
The school district they were in really tried to minimize the anxiety around this test. In elementary school, students weren’t told the test was coming until a few days before, although the parents were given enough advance warning not to schedule appointments for their children. But even in a district that worked hard not to put too much emphasis on the test, it still created a lot of undue pressure and definitely influenced the curriculum and limited teacher creativity. How could it not? Our property values were, of course, tied to the excellence of the schools, and one metric incoming families used to measure this excellence was our MCAS scores.
Ooh, I get the “not enough growth” thing. My STARS test scores indicate that I haven’t learned anything in English for the last three years (which isn’t far from the truth, to be honest) because I haven’t gotten an increase in scores for that time.