New tests, more tests, better tests – but do the standardized tests pass the smell test?
Come the 2014-2015 school year, students in Franklin Lakes, Oakland, Wyckoff, and throughout New Jersey will be taking new tests, more tests, and what some are saying are better tests as part of the PARCC consortium. Readers can click here to see a sample math question.
PARCC is aimed at improving and standardizing tests across state lines as these tests become the foundation for accountability efforts like President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and the incentives of President Obama’s Race To The Top.
Since 2001 when NCLB was enacted, standardized testing has become the national thermometer used for deciding who gets how much money. The tests have become integral and critical components for evaluating not just students, but their schools and their teachers.
It is this high stakes testing which led to suspicions of organized test cheating in New Jersey, and the historic indictment in March of 2013 that named 34 teachers and administrators in Atlanta, Georgia – including the superintendent of schools who in 2009 was named National Superintendent of The Year.
Billions of federal dollars are being awarded based on standardized tests, and billions in profits are being made on standardized testing; and, many are describing these developments – along with the overall rising costs associated with college, secondary and primary schools – as part of a growing “education industrial complex” .
The new term, education industrial complex, is used in reference to President Eisenhower’s warning of a military industrial complex.
Standardized testing, which in NJ may account for anywhere from 30% to 50% of a teacher evaluation, is embraced by many who see it as an objective evaluation of whether students are meeting grade appropriate educational goals. Schools have a year to prepare for the new online testing planned for the 2014-2015.
In New Jersey, schools will need to invest in their technology programs to provide for online testing with is to take place in 2014-2015. This is one of the arguments used by the Ramapo Indian Hills BOE for investing in their laptop initiative.
The online testing will not be limited to high school students, and grammar schools in the FLOW district are expected to have at least half as many computers as students for their largest grade. (100 students in a grade would mean 50 devices available for testing).
As the federal government, along with local and state governments, prepares to spend billions more on accountability programs built around standardized testing, a heated debate continues with teachers, students, parents and educators protesting the rise of high stakes testing.
Hundreds of college professors and academics in Massachusetts have joined their colleagues in Texas, Chicago, Georgia, Ohio and New York to formally protest the invasive growth of standardized testing in the educational process. In Colorado, Rhode Island, and Oregon, students have actively protested during the standardized testing season of 2013.
In Washington State, teachers and students organized a strike against standardized testing this March ; and, for the past few years there has been a growing trend of parents choosing to “opt out” by keeping their children home during the testing days that occur every spring.
Two of the most high profile voices involved in the education debate, Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch, have been engaged in a personal back and forth in the press and online.
Ravitch, a former proponent of standardized testing, has recently been responding to Rhee’s active promotion of testing. Ravitch claimed Rhee’s arguments favoring investment in standardized testing was ill founded; Ravitch claims that the low scoring of the United States is because of the wide economic discrepancy among students and not the overall education provided by schools.
Ravitch has gone so far as to question the legitimacy of Rhee’s faith in standardized testing by pointing out that Rhee’s daughter attends a private school that dismisses the value of standardized testing.
In New Jersey, Republican Governor Chris Christie and Newark’s Democratic Mayor Cory Booker have partnered on various other school reform movements, but parted ways on the standardized testing issue.
Billions of dollars will continue to pour into standardized testing and the accountability processes aimed at improving education in America. The debate on this investment, and how it fundamentally improves education will also continue.
The new PARCC computerized exams sets to hit New Jersey schools are promoted as more advanced in evaluating student skills beyond the multiple guess associated with standardized testing; they are also promoted as more advanced in terms of being able to weed out cheating.
Whether PARCC can limit cheating which is becoming a nationwide problem, or if teachers and administrators will end up devoting more school time teaching to the test, are issues that will be examined as the new tests roll out in the 2014-2015 school year.
Submitted by Charles McCormick
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