Commenters on the AJC Get Schooled blog had a range of reaction to Maureen Downey’s column last week on the growing parent resistance to standardized tests. In some areas of the country, there have been organized boycotts of state exams. While there’s no organized effort against the CRCT in Georgia, there are concerns about the value of the annual test. Here is a sampling of blog comments:
Crankee: One of the ways to truly assess a student's progress is through a portfolio. You can see what the student has learned through the child's actual work. Areas needing improvement stand out, as do areas of strength. Portfolios cannot be distilled down into a multiple choice, regurgitative-type test. When sanity returns, we will again have authentic assessments that show actual student progress. Until then, we are stuck with regurgitation, since that is all politicians can easily understand.
Pride: This is just flat-out propaganda. No, it isn't the test that makes students anxious. It is the teachers who are pressuring the kids that cause the anxiety and fear, not the test itself.
Class: All these tests see if students have mastered the very basics. They should just be a formality. Students need to just get used to taking tests. Remember, the reason we have tests like this is because you could not rely on teacher grades to be reflective of mastery.
FlaTony: The use of testing to monitor learning has been perverted in many ways, and the biggest perversion of all is happening behind the scenes right now. Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates have a joint venture called inBloom that, through recently relaxed federal regulations, allows them to collect all the test data from states from all the tests your kids take. The amassed data will be available to corporations seeking to enrich their bottom line. This "data warehouse" will become a permanent collection of personally identifiable data from the children in our schools. I think it is time to rein in big brother. Corporatist education reform is much worse than people know.
Carlos: The problem isn't with the CRCT tests themselves, but with the uses to which they're being put: single-factor evaluations of schools and teachers. Tests are nothing more than one type of feedback on whether concepts are being learned. The standardized tests are a step above what the classroom teacher can do in terms of validity. I remember the annual ritual of Iowa tests in grade school and, somehow, survived.
Jarvis: Are the other tests being taken by each school system a waste of time and money? I'm sure some type of standard assessment is useful, but what is it? How useful is a test to setting out learning criteria for a given student? From what I'm reading, the CRCT doesn't report in depth enough to really say which skills a kid needs to work on. That sort of data should be provided. Otherwise, what's the point?
Mattie: As a parent, I want to know how my child tests against other children the same age and grade. How else do I know if they are getting a quality education? I bet parents who do not allow their child to take the test already know their child will fail.
Parent Teacher: The testing companies have admitted that there is as much as a 40 percent margin of error when using the test to evaluate teachers. They have further stated that their tests were never designed for evaluating teachers. So for those who want to expand the CRCT or other tests for teacher pay and evaluations, you need to understand that this was not what these tests were designed for.
