Bogus test score increases in Maryland?
Maryland may be faking an increase in test scores, according to Sunday's Washington Post. Author and New America Foundation Fellow J.H. Snider begins by detailing the the potential test misuses and abuses:
No one in his right mind can be against raising test scores. That's like being against motherhood and apple pie. The concern is over how it's done: Are there adequate safeguards from abuse? Unfortunately, the answer is no. There are many ways to abuse a system of test-based accountability. The most widely reported is "teaching to the test." If tests don't accurately measure real performance, then teaching to the test may detract from learning...
An important qualification - "teaching to the test" is indeed an hindrance to learning if the test is not measuring the right constructs.
Another abuse is to dumb down the test: Instead of raising the performance of kids, the level of the test is brought down to that of the kids. Because the No Child Left Behind Act leaves the choice of test to the state, many have chosen this strategy. They can't fail if they set the bar low enough.
...which is what we're seeing with so many high school exit exams. An exit exam with a high passing bar is going to be a more rigorous measure of what a high-school student has learned, but schools are unwilling to flunk the large numbers of students who will fail to pass under strict conditions. So the passing requirements have been lowered to the point that these exams serve as a minimal competency measures of less-than-12th-grade knowledge (the FCAT, for example, has 10th-grade-level items).
Moreover, test-based accountability may measure only output, not productivity. Productivity reflects both test scores (outputs) and resources put into educating children (inputs). Anne Arundel County, ground zero of Maryland's test-based accountability reform agenda, provides an excellent example of the results of Maryland's perverse incentive system, which rewards higher output but not higher productivity...The productivity abuse is very simple. Only a small fraction of subjects are actually tested. And only a small fraction of these -- reading and math -- are high-profile, high-stakes tests. So the trick is to shift resources from the untested subjects to the tested ones...None of this was advertised. Advocates of test-based reforms didn't call for a back-to-basics curriculum...They promised excellence and higher achievement across the board.
Perhaps. But I believe that most testing supporters understand that children who aren't mastering math and reading aren't necessarily going to benefit from a more "well-rounded curriculum." The point of the NCLB is to make sure that every child can read, and it's not surprising that the results are seemingly becoming No Child Gets Ahead. It's not surprising that schools with limited resources are shutting down other courses to focus on reading and math. Ideally, yes, every child would master reading early enough so that more advanced courses will be beneficial. But when kids are still illiterate in high school, does a "well-rounded curriculum" really make sense?
The so-called "cannibalizing" of untested school subjects is not, I think, a "bogus" way of increasing the educational productivity of low-performing schools. It's merely the most realistic response to the demand that all children be taught to read. I wish the author had asked why it is that current schools, with their layers of bureaucracy and their obedience of teachers' unions, can't manage to teach reading and math along all those other subjects. Certainly, schools used to be capable of this.
Thanks to Devoted Reader Richard H. for the link.