New York City's schoolchildren in grades 3 through 8 will now be taking six more standardized exams per year - but these won't be high-stakes exams. Instead, they'll be special diagnostic exams, prepared by the Princeton Review, to show how well students are meeting the educational goals before the high-stakes standardized tests are administered.
Now, I'm all for diagnostics, and given that the tests will be computerized (in schools that have the capability), the kids probably won't mind them so much, and results will be almost immediately available to teachers (if all goes well). But this is starting to feel like overkill.
The exams are no-stakes, which means that the results may not be that predictive of how students are going to do on the high-stakes exams. The exams might cause children to burn out before the important testing time comes along. And do teachers really need that extra diagnostic information - so much so that they're willing to give up that much more classroom time for additional testing? Will the test results be easy to incorporate into feedback for students? And what if a student's no-stakes test results don't gibe with the teacher's impression of that student's abilities? Does the teacher then focus on teaching the content, or the test-taking skills?
Update: Peter of Catholic School Blogger is concerned about this over-testing issue as well. He links to an article showing that only 5% of McAllen, TX's third-graders failed to pass the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) - but what happens to that 5%? They're probably going to be retained. Peter wonders:
What's going to happen next year to the students for whom retention doesn't work, and who don't pass the test a second time? Social promotion? If so, doesn't that defeat the idea behind the requirement? Are they going to be retained again, or moved to a different school?...
Sooner or later, schools are faced with a stark choice...admit that there are children in their care who cannot meet state-mandated requirements and therefore cannot pass, or throw their hands up and find some way to go back to business as usual...
Good question. Thanks to these high-stakes exams in the lower grades, social promotion is no longer an option, and I don't know if anyone knows what should be done with the kids who continue to fail at this young an age. The point of this early testing, of course, is to give extra help to those who need it, and the idea is that if a grade must be repeated, so be it. But are schools really willing to take this idea to its logical conclusion, and keep kids in third grade for more than two years?
Instead, will the failers be sent to special education classes? Will they be given special test-preparation courses? Will they be given disability diagnoses (which may or may not be accurate) that allow them to take the test with accommodations?
Or will they remain in third grade until they're old enough to legally drop out?
Posted by kswygert at July 17, 2003 11:11 AM