Civil rights groups back high stakes testing

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/14/what-are-these-civil-rights-groups-thinking

Nineteen organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the United Negro College Fund, just issued a joint statement (see text and full list of signatories below) about what they would like to see in a newly written No Child Left Behind law, which is the top priority of Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the new chairman of the Senate education committee. And in their statement, they make some faulty assumptions about teaching and learning that have been the basis of flawed education reforms in the past.

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It presumes that high-stakes standardized testing has led to more equity for students. There is no evidence that it has. It presumes that high-stakes standardized tests are valid and reliable measure of what students know and how much teachers have contributed to student progress, but assessment experts say they aren’t. It presumes that requiring testing is the only way to ensure that minority and disabled students get attention. That’s shallow thinking.

We have had 13 years of federally mandated annual testing, and achievement gaps are still gaping. As education historian and activist Diane Ravitch noted on her blog, tests don’t help close achievement gaps; they only measure them. What standardized tests measure accurately is family income; look at SAT and other scores to see how closely they are linked to wealth and poverty. Standardized tests benefit students from privileged families, not children from low-income and minority families or children with disabilities.

Why would civil rights groups think that it is a civil right for students to take a test? The joint statement makes other assumptions about education that are, well, merely assumptions.

As my colleague Emma Brown reported, the joint statement calls for Congress to maintain requirements that states take action when schools do not meet performance targets or close achievement gaps among groups of students. NCLB required that struggling schools face consequences ranging from firing staff members to closing and reopening as a charter school, even though there is no real evidence that these “remedies” have worked.