Commenters on the AJC Get School blog had a wide range of responses to an AJC investigation into standardized testing errors and to a call by critics of the practice for an end to high-stakes testing in which children are evaluated for promotion and graduation based largely on test scores. Here is a sample of the comments:
Astro: No sale. Tests are not the be all-end all, but they are a valuable tool to see where we stand. No, the only phony accountability is the education cartel policing itself. It's only since we have awakened to the internal rot in the school establishment that the educrats want to shoot the messenger.
DC: And we need to stop keeping score at football, baseball and basketball games as well — because it's just not fair to the players or coaches.
Arthur: If testing hurts students of color, why are Korean kids getting the highest scores at my kids' schools? There has never been a study that proves the disparities in suspension rates is due to bias or racism. Yet people on the left take it as gospel. I find it ironic that people who claim to care about education can't understand the concept of "correlation does not mean causation."
DG: The problem I see is not that students are stupid or aren't learning what they need to learn; it's the process we have chosen to evaluate them with. They don't like it, they don't see the value of it, or they just don't care. They aren't involved in this process. I've asked, why we can't do a portfolio type of assessment? I know the answer is simple: Who is going to evaluate these, and at what cost? It's so much easier to run tests through a machine and say, oh gee, we have horrible teachers. Finally, take this into account. We test nearly every American student and say we are failing against the rest of the world. How many other countries are putting every student through this? Not many. Most of our competitors out there are only testing their best students, and they are sharing those results.
Tref: When buying a horse, it's best to test its legs and to look it in the teeth, not the tail. To evaluate a student, study the student. To evaluate a teacher, study the teacher. To evaluate a school, study the school. Evaluating schools according to student test scores is like evaluating a horse by staring at its arse. Stop using standardized, norm-referenced pencil tests — and conscript test takers — as administrative and political conveniences. Better still, stop using these dipstick political devices altogether.
Mathmom: Over the past 15 years, my observation has been that the level of student achievement has been inversely proportional to the number of standardized tests taken. The higher the number of tests, the lower the achievement. Despite claims to the contrary, the math curriculum has been dumbed down to the point of absurdity. What makes it appear to be more challenging is that students who are not both willing and able to do what is now standard high school math are forced to take these courses and, generally speaking, do not do well. To show that all students can be "proficient" in high school mathematics on standardized tests, high school math courses (and the tests) have been scaled back over and over again. It's an insane misuse of taxpayers' money, cruel to students and frustrating for teachers.
