Lesley University New Teacher Community: Student Test Scores and You

?

As we come to the end of another MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) testing season, I want to remind you of something you learned during your teacher training.? Your students are not their test scores. Leading educator Diane Ravitch agrees.? Author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she spoke at Lesley last week about the alarming efforts underfoot to use student test scores to evaluate teachers.?? Her experience as an educator, researcher, historian, former Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor in the senior Bush administration's Department of Education, and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board (which oversees federal testing) in the Clinton administration informs her work from the ground up. Dr. Ravitch spoke at length about what she describes as determined efforts to deprofessionalize teaching through efforts such as stripping teachers of their bargaining rights, privatization, the heavy-handed involvement of big money and big business in education, merit pay, and misuse of state testing systems.? To measure teacher effectiveness with student high stakes test scores is simply wrong, she stated. First, the tests are not designed for that purpose, a point that is affirmed by all leading testing experts.? The tests are only designed to measure student progress. Second, too many other factors are at work in determining student testing outcomes: family income, parents? education level, access to medical care, the number of books in the home, if families have been on trips, and how many conversations families have with their children about ideas and about the world. In fact, Dr. Ravitch said, a student?s family background contributes about 60% to a student?s success in school.? This is not news to trained teachers, of course, who have always known that students in richer towns do better on standardized tests than those in poorer ones. She spoke in greater detail about the collateral damage of too much testing.? ?More time for testing means less time for education,? she stated. ?The tests teach obedience and conformity.?? Is that what we want for our democracy? As more time is spent on test prep, learning that supports the imagination and creativity will disappear. In her book, Dr. Ravitch references the research of Daniel Koretz, a Harvard psychometrician, who found that ?coaching students for state tests produces test score inflation and the illusion of progress" (p. 159). Koretz?s research shows that when teachers restrict their teaching to what is going to appear on the test, then that knowledge does not generalize to ?other tests of the same subject or to performance in real life? (p. 160). When you trained at Lesley to be a teacher, you learned that high stakes test scores are just one source of data to use to measure student performance.?You learned how to use many assessments such as student daily work, homework, projects, quizzes, presentations, performances, conferences and teacher observation.? You learned the value of informal versus formal assessments and formative versus summative assessments.? Above all, you learned that how a student performs on an assessment reflects only how the student performed on that test on that day.? As one teacher recently told me, ?if their cat died that morning and they?re feeling bad, I can?t control that!? Above all, you learned during your teacher education that student assessment is diagnostic and helps inform your teaching.? And therein lies the problem, Dr. Ravitch says. ?You are a trained professional educator. ?The current crop of education "reformers," she states, are not.? They are business people backed by billions of dollars who want to misuse students? high stakes test scores to evaluate teachers.

Every teacher wants a fair and helpful evaluation.? But Dr. Ravitch?s research shows that using students? test scores as part of it is both punitive and a misuse of the data.? What do you think?

Kathleen M. Nollet, Ph.D.

Reference

Ravitch, D. (2010). ?The death and life of the great American school system: ?How testing and choice are undermining education.??New York: Basic Books.?

Source: http://lesleyntc.blogspot.com/2011/05/student-test-scores-and-you.html

preeclampsia starbucks origins bruce springsteen jim caviezel mononucleosis pandas