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Fix 'em, don't nix 'em: Tests show what's working and what's not

Writer's picture: Joanne JacobsJoanne Jacobs

The Zeitgeist, it is a changing. First, the New York Times ran David Leonhardt's defense of college admissions tests as a way to identified talented students from not-so-great high schools. Now Jessica Grose, who writes a New York Times newsletter, explains why K-12 testing can show what's working -- or not -- and who's learning.


New York remains the “national epicenter” of the "opt-out" movement, she writes. Parents -- mostly middle-class and white -- see testing as stressful, time-consuming and unnecessary.


Grose doesn't mention it, but I think some parents don't want to hear anything but good news about their children. They prefer inflated grades to standardized test scores.


But test scores can be useful, writes Grose. She quotes Times reporter Sarah Mervosh on the “revolt” against balanced literacy: “The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.”


Testing reformers are trying to address concerns that tests are "too long, don’t really capture the depth of what students know and the results come in too late" to be useful to teachers, writes Grose.  


Florida and Texas are piloting shorter tests that can be given in fall, winter and spring. The results may be reported within a week. That gives teachers actionable information on how students are doing.


Every question is reviewed by a group of teachers and field-tested for bias, said Iris Tian of the Texas Education Agency told Grose. Test designers get "feedback from the schools to make sure that the information teachers and principals are getting from the tests is actually useful to them." They're trying to make the test as short as possible, while still providing valid data. The goal is to mirror what teachers are teaching, instead of forcing teachers to "teach to the test."


"Educational gaps between the haves and the have-nots were exacerbated by the pandemic, " Grose writes. "Without standardized testing, we won’t know where to put the most resources, or what the contours of the problems students face even look like."


Ignorance is not bliss.

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Jan 19, 2024

Huh, teachers having actionable intelligence about how the students, who they are with 7 hours a day, are doing.


Now, how could they ever figure that out without an hours-long standardized test? It's a mystery!


It's not like formative assessments are a thing, or anything.


https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/basics/formative-summative.html


Ann in L.A.

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superdestroyer
Jan 20, 2024
Replying to

It is for management to see how the teacher is doing and to see how teachers in comparable situations are doing or schools in comparable situations are doing.


I never understand people who think they are being clever by intentionally misunderstanding something.

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m_t_anderson
Jan 19, 2024

Three cheers for shorter tests! I've often claimed that I could determine how well my undergrads were doing with a 3-question open answer exam, or even better, a 10-minute oral exam. But a 20-question exam, carefully designed and analyzed, might be far more useful than the massive "gatekeeper" exams still popular these days.

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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Jan 20, 2024
Replying to

The problem here is that high school exiting is confused with college admission: I support exams in the latter case, but we need more youth to go into vocational education & training, and exam mandates discourage too many of them into dropping out, ending up not in education, employment, or training, a considerable burden in the United States (and elsewhere).

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