As we give the kids a half day off so that the teachers of the district can gather to work on plans to improve student test scores on the TAKS test (not student learning -- student test scores), I'm pleased by this Bob Herbert piece in the New York Times today.

Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.

Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”

The short answer, he said, is no.

If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.

“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”

The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.

Time and again I have been run through the latest fad training system designed to help me improve student test scores. The problem, though, is that some of these practices run directly contrary to encouraging the higher order thinking skills we ought to be encouraging. And what's worse, teaching everything that is (or could be) on the test for my students means short-changing them on what everyone agrees is more important material. That is why world history students in many districts get less than two weeks -- combined -- studying ancient Greece and Rome. And since my grade level test is 50% American history (and they haven't taken US History since 8th grade), I have to devote time going back and re-teaching that content, further short-changing mastery of the world history content my students ought to be learning.

I'm all for standards, but I just don't se our current system as working. And that isn't a Texas thing. It is a national problem.

Posted by: Greg at 10:38 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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