What's wrong with high stakes testing

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post 
 
1. Teachers are being evaluated on the test scores of students they never had and subjects they don’t teach.

This sounds like a fantasy, but alas, it is not. A number of states have passed laws requiring that teachers be evaluated in part (often in large part) by standardized test scores — but, most subjects don’t yet have standardized tests on which to attach high stakes. So complicated (and invalid) formulas are used to devise how teachers who don’t teach math and English are judged by the test scores of teachers who do...

States, devising complicated ways to measure student growth, found themselves confronted with the problem that most teachers taught subjects for which there were no standardized tests. That led to a rush of field testing for assessments in all subjects (including yearbook) in many places, and systems that evaluated teachers on subjects and students they didn’t teach. It never made sense, but that didn’t seem to matter. This may sound like fiction, but it’s what actually happened. So goes the path of “school reform.”

2. Custodians have also been evaluated by student standardized test scores.

This really happened for years in Washington D.C., under the school system’s IMPACT evaluation system that began under former chancellor Michelle Rhee in 2009...

3. Children who don’t have the mental capacity to distinguish between an apple and an orange are still required to take standardized tests.

This happened in Florida, where a blind 9-year-old boy named Michael who was born with a brain stem but without most of his brain — the part that controls cognition — was forced to take a version of the state’s standardized test, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. You can read the hideous story here, here and here, but in this test-obsessed environment, Michael’s wasn’t the only recent case in Florida and the issue isn’t singular to Florida.

4. Teachers are evaluated on student test scores based on “value added modeling,” or VAM, complicated mathematical formulas that purportedly can tease out just how much influence a teacher has in the achievement of their students.

Testing experts say these formulas can’t reliably accomplish this and too often label bad teachers as good and good teachers as bad.

Consider the case of Carolyn Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Though her students are highly successful, she somehow was rated as the worst 8th grade math teacher in the city. Read about it here and don’t think this kind of mistake is a rarity.

5. Reformers have attached high-stakes consequences to these tests even though the assessments:

–can’t assess the ability to think creatively or deeply
–are not considered reliable by experts
–are poor measures for how much learning a student has done.