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By Dr. Harry Tennant
Monday, March 26, 2012 Education Ride 365: Warning, This Prescription May Produce Dangerous Side Effects Texas launched its statewide "STAAR" testing today as a replacement for its previous system, TAKS. The school accountability movement nationwide is almost exclusively based upon these types of standardized tests. I have discussed some of the pros and cons of these exams in previous posts and will certainly discuss them more in coming posts. Evaluating districts, schools, teachers, and students in this manner is not as commonsensical as it may seem. It is fraught with unintended consequences and ripe for abuse. Consider a report today by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailing their study of the largest school districts across America which, in part, found that: "Overall, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had enough suspect tests that the odds of the results occurring by chance alone were worse than one in 1,000." The full article can be accessed here. Imagine the potential extent of this problem as teacher pay ('merit pay') is increasingly linked to these tests. Furthermore, consider the growing trend of publishing individual teacher results (the average performance of each individual teacher's students) as part of the public record, to be reported by the media for all to see. Here is an interesting promotional video piece that accompanies the article cited above: How ironic is it, too, that we are creating a system in which significant student gains are an indicator of dishonest behavior! Improve, just don't improve too much in one year lest a red flag fly high over your school/district! Again, cheating is but one of many unintended consequences of an accountability movement intended to improve school performance for the betterment of our children. The motivation for high stakes testing is just...but like most any medicine intended to cure ills---> there are significant side effects. On balance, are we on track? Posted at 11:42 PM Keywords: Education Ride 365 , EdClick , Cycle Of Education , Accountability , Cheating , Merit Pay , Standardized Testing , STAAR 0 Comments |