Can New York Clean Up the Testing Mess?

[proud2BlibKansan]

As New York State’s executive and legislative branches sank into a swamp of corruption and political paralysis this winter, something brave, honest, and totally unexpected took place in one Albany office. Pounding the table and refusing to accept any more excuses, the new chancellor of the Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, forced the state’s notoriously dysfunctional department of education to submit to an outside audit of the reading and math tests, mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, that it has administered to all students in grades three through eight. A memorandum of understanding between the department and Harvard professor Daniel Koretz—one of the nation’s top testing experts—gives Koretz access to the data that he’ll need to determine whether New York’s test scores have been inflated. And once he does, it’s likely that the state’s claims of spectacular student progress will be revealed as an illusion.

Such a development would be healthy for education reform nationally, because all states need to come clean about test-score inflation. Reliable tests of student achievement are as essential for improving education as accurate monitoring of blood-sugar levels was to advancing the treatment of diabetes. Unfortunately, when NCLB became law, it left the door wide open to massive test inflation by stipulating that all American students “will be proficient” by the year 2014—and imposing a series of increasingly onerous sanctions on districts and schools not moving toward that goal—yet allowing each state to develop its own tests and set its own standard for “proficiency.” Since men are not angels, it was inevitable that some state education authorities would lower the proficiency bar to make themselves look good to the feds.

Now the Obama administration has launched the most expansive (and expensive) federal school-reform initiative in American history. Like NCLB, the initiative judges teachers, schools, and states by improvements in students’ test scores. But testing could be the Achilles’ heel of Obama’s reform agenda unless states like New York, where sudden student improvements strain all credulity, shape up.

For more than two decades, mainstream American social science has recognized that accountability schemes like NCLB can lead to fraud and distortion. The principle even has a name: Campbell’s Law, after Donald Campbell, one of the greatest American social scientists of the twentieth century. In one study, Campbell observed various companies’ attempts to improve employees’ performance indicators by giving them incentives. He came up with this general formulation: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

more . . . http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_ny-education-testing.html

[msongs]

1. the real purpose of testing is to generate $$ for profit making "test" corporations nt

[Hannah Bell]

2. wouldn't it be delicious? all the big-city school deforms unmasked as the frauds & resource grabs

they are.