No mas, cry survey respondents in Alabama, who think there's too much standardized testing:
Two-thirds of respondents to a new statewide poll favor reducing the number of standardized tests that public school students must take. A slight majority, meanwhile, said they believe that such tests gauge teachers' test-preparation abilities rather than students' actual knowledge, according to the results of the Mobile Register-University of South Alabama poll...
Jo Ann Webb, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the argument faulting educators for "teaching to the test" is invalid. "If you teach a child, then test a child on that information, then I don't understand the criticism," Webb said. "You're still teaching the child."
The majority of those polled still support the high school graduation exam, though, because they believe that really does hold schools accountable for what students learn. And I can understand their frustration with the long list of tests facing Alabama's students:
Depending on their grade level, elementary and middle school students must take some or all of the following tests: Stanford Achievement Test, Alabama Direct Assessment of Writing, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) test.
Being added to that lineup this year is the new Alabama Reading and Math Test, which will be given to third-, fifth- and seventh-graders. Also, all Mobile County students have begun taking standardized quarterly exams, known as Criterion Referenced Tests, in each subject.
To graduate, high school students must pass all five portions of the graduation exam: math, language, reading, science and social studies. Special education students take the Alabama Alternate Assessment to get a diploma. College-bound students also take the ACT anor SAT admissions exams.
One Mobile County spokeswoman insists the tests are necessary:
"How else can we find out what our children know?" said Nancy Pierce, spokeswoman for the Mobile County Public School System. Pierce said testing allows teachers and schools to evaluate their progress in preparing students for the next grade level.
"If you don't know what subjects and verbs are, how can you go into more elaborate sentence construction? If you can't do addition, how can you go into multiplication and division?" Pierce said. "If students don't have certain concepts, they can't go on."
To me, this statement implies that the sort of objective assessment needed to decide whether a students is ready to progress to the next level isn't being done by teachers in the classroom. Is Pierce wrong in assuming that, or are the teachers' classroom assessments so subjective and/or inflated that Alabama needs a slew of standardized tests in order to tell what's going on?
Posted by kswygert at March 1, 2004 10:22 AM