High Stakes Testing: What No One’s Telling You2007-06-15 18:42:00
In our culture of high stakes testing, we have become fixated on test scores and district passing rates. Those schools with low passage rates are deemed ineffective in the court of public opinion, and the public seems not to care that certain schools have students who come to the table with more disadvantages than students at other schools—be those disadvantages economic, psychological, learning based, and so forth. But amidst this frenzy about testing, and this talk about standards, there is something no one’s telling you: by and large, teachers find the test to be an impediment to good learning, and state standards are not legally required—though most teachers think they are.
What we have, then, are teachers wasting time playing a matching game—finding the coded state standard to which a particular classroom activity aligns for the sake of documentation. That is time not spent trying to find creative new ways to teach kids.
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