> SOL tests are inherently unfair,
I regularly see claims that tests are at odds with learning. What I don't understand is how anyone can tell what kids have learned without some sort of test.
I regularly see claims that tests are at odds with learning. What I don't understand is how anyone can tell what kids have learned without some sort of test.
So, I have no problem with testing, per se.
Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer.
The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside.
The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools.
If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives.
/rant
I think the idea of trying to stack rank teachers and schools works about as well as stack ranking engineers. It's garbage-in garbage-out. The entire premise is faulty.
"You can only improve what you can measure" works great on manufacturing lines and click-through-rates. Not so much, strike that, not at all on humans.
Edit: analog31, exactly that, you are spot on.
Further, if we accept your nihilistic belief that measurement is impossible, how can we know if teaching matters at all? What other sectors of the world does science fail in?
Also such big dependence on tests seems to me like the result of people trying to structure out trust from their relationship.
By which I mean, when kids can't memorize all the stuff that they have learned by heart, and then when they can't produce an exact replica of a procedure or something without some kind of reference, we equate it to their not having learned it in the first place.
Programmers create docs for the purpose of referring to them, doctors must look things up as opposed to simply relying upon a faulty memory, etc.
Kids get the impression that to learn is to fill their memories as opposed to be able to analyze in new scenarios, and that if they can't memorize facts then they are a 'bad learner'. These standards just aren't fair.
BTW, you can't get a license to practice medicine without passing a standardized test.
I can't help but feel that the problem lies in a fatal combination of non-filtering teacher training (as sentimented by "oh, anyone can teach", and as mentioned by that recent Finnish education post), community culture that talks more than acts about the importance of high quality education and self-motivation, and a lack of funding for those (like OP) who give it their all.
edit: I also think that we should encourage a sense of trusting (maybe government-trained) educators with being able to identify which children in their class need to learn what, better than a test could. I'm not so sure what the benefit is to ignoring the individuals at the 'dx' scale of the educational calculus.
But you can also give problems, like 'here are the dimensions of some real-world problem, and here's a formula used to solve such problems, apply one to the other'; or 'here's the text of a poem by so-and-so, explain what you think the poet means and support your arguments with reference to the text.'
I know essay answers take longer to evaluate and are harder to score, but I get the impression that way too much of k-12 educational testing involves multiple-choice questionnaires.
This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To use the WW2 example, the answer to "who" is "Germany&allies vs Russia&allies" (an oversimplification), but it's far more important to know why they were fighting (a fight between different political ideologies, including Nazism and Communism). Education focuses too much on (possibly useless) facts, and far too little on the logic behind them, or why they matter.
1) As system, schools tend to teach towards the test, at the expense of a diverse education.
2) The tests essentially test how good a student is at doing tests, rather than what they have understood and learned. Children can do brilliantly in the classroom and badly on the test, then be marked as a poor student.
3) The tests are used to categorise the children as they go though the school system (eg. school entries). It's not fair to hold an 8-year old's test score against them 3 years later as they choose their high school.
For Australian readers: did you know that NAPLAN, the Australian standardised test, is purely voluntary, despite the school system making out that it is compulsory? The form to withdraw a child is online [1]. All you have to do is fill it out and give it to your principal, no questions asked.
You will notice that the official NAPLAN info goes out its way to give the impression that a parent needs a special excuse to decline testing for their children [2]. This is because "All Australian governments have committed to promoting maximum participation of students in the national assessment process" [3], despite what might be best for the child.
[1] http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/languagesuppor...
[2] http://www.nap.edu.au/naplan/school-support/student-particip...
[3] http://www.nap.edu.au/information/faqs/naplan--participation...
By way of example, typical advice is to concentrate on challenge, rather than quantity when teaching these students. Rather than giving them 50 problems of varying difficulty, just give them the 5 hardest ones. When assessing, rather than giving them lots of questions of varying difficulty (like a typical standard test), give them fewer questions, but make them require more thought.
As a parent, who helps in the classroom and observes quite a few children, I'd say that at least 10% of the children in my (typical) school would fall into the gifted category (by measured intelligence) and of those, probably more than half have some soft of learning difficulty. I'd also say that these children will be sold short by the standardised testing.
Also, I've seen tests so dumb that the better you understand a subject, the worse your chances are - because questions and answer templates are stupid/made by people who didn't master the subject, and if you understand things well, you're likely to write something that doesn't match the answer template.
This gets impressively more common at undergraduate level.
You don't believe you can identify mastery any other way, so you don't identify it any other way, and so you believe that testing is the only way to identify mastery. OK, but this circular logic is broken.
You could show subject mastery by creating anything, or performing anything, or explaining something verbally to someone else, or by earning money in that field. Writing answers to test questions is rarely a relevant skill and more often tests whether you were told about the exam's quirks rather than mastery of the subject.