Ravitch: Opt Your Child Out of State Testing: Don't Feed the Machine

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/01-2

This week begins the make-or-break, do-or-die standardized testing that will label your child a success or a failure. I urge you not to let your child take the state test.

Opt out.

The best test for students is the test made by their teacher. Teachers know what they taught; they test what the students were taught. They get instant feedback. They can find out immediately which students didn't understand the lesson and need extra help. They can get instant feedback about their own success or lack of success if the students didn't learn what they taught.

The standardized tests are useless for instant feedback. They have no diagnostic value. The test asks questions that may cover concepts that were never introduced in class. The test is multiple-choice, creating an unrealistic expectation that all questions have only one right answer. The tests may have errors, e.g., two right answers or no right answers or a confusing question. The test results are returned months after the test, meaning that the student now has a different teacher. The test scores give no breakdown of what the student did or did not understand, just a score.

These days, the purpose of the tests is to evaluate the teacher; most researchers agree that using student scores to evaluate teachers gives inaccurate and unable results. This year's "effective" teacher may be next year's "ineffective" teacher. "Value-added-measurement" has not proven to work anywhere. Most teachers don't teach tested subjects and they are assigned rating based on the results of the school as a whole. A music teacher may be found "ineffective" based on the school's math scores. This is madness.

Because the tests have no diagnostic value for students, they are worthless. If they can't be used to help students or to improve instruction, they shouldn't be used at all. We can learn all we need to know about states or cities by sampling (like NAEP, which compares states to states, and cities to cities). We can learn all we need to know about individual students by relying on teacher judgment and testing in specific grades, like 4 and 8.