"I still believe in standardized testing," [Fort Wayne, Indiana, testing director John] Kline said. "I just don't think the industry is ready to give us the tests we need."
You wonder what it would take for this guy NOT to believe in standardized testing. (We'll ignore the notorious biases of standardized tests, shall we? Let's shall.) To be sure, Indiana got off easy; because the one sensible decision they made was not to base everything on standardized test results, and because they got CTB to adjust the scores the first time they insisted that something was wrong, not much happened that wouldn't have happened anyway. In New York City, nearly 9,000 students were unnecessarily forced to attend summer school during a particularly brutal summer, and several teachers and superintendents were fired. Nevada wound up spending money unnecessarily on schools rated as "inadequate" that could have better been spent on a school that actually was inadequate. And on top of that, the company blatantly lied about what was going on. (I still find it remarkable that Tennessee actually makes sensible use of test results -- as sensible as you can get with standardized tests, anyway. And they're apparently virtually alone in taking this approach, which baffles the mind; why wouldn't you prefer to track a particular student's progress, rather than simply comparing students to people who were previously in that grade?)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!