Panel Finds Few Learning Gains From Testing Movement

[Sancho]

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/05/26/33academy.h30.html?tkn=OOQFdh5WFx3FP%2BD8YjRj8tB%2FX2lbo4Wt%2BjM4&print=1

Eduweek

Panel Finds Few Learning Gains From Testing Movement
By Sarah D. Sparks

Nearly a decade of America’s test-based accountability systems, from “adequate yearly progress” to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and insufficient safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report.
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In fact, the report found that, rather than leading to higher academic achievement, high school exit exams so far have decreased high school graduation rates nationwide by an average of about 2 percentage points.
-snip-
“We need to look seriously at the costs and benefits of these programs,” said Daniel M. Koretz, a committee member and an education professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. “We have put a lot into these programs over a period of many years, and the positive effects when we can find them have been pretty disappointing.”


This 15 year national and international study demonstrates that test scores, pay-for-scores, and NCLB requirements resulted in little or no academic progress, more cheating, and more dropouts. Sounds like a good use of lots of dollars. Arne Duncan, can you read?

[csziggy]

1. How many billions of dollars have gone into these testing programs?

I wonder how much improvement students would have shown if those billions had been spent directly on educational resources rather than on testing programs administered by for profit companies.

[intheozone]

2. Yea, the Bush boys made a lot of money selling their shit to the schools, so it's OK.

At least, according to the Repugs, it's all worth it. That's is just how that party thinks!

[Hannah Bell]

3. why would anyone expect that giving more tests would improve actual learning?

idiotic when they thought of it, still idiotic.

[Sancho]

4. In FL, $126,000,000 to make the test...

$40,000,000 each year to administer it. Now we're laying off teachers and won't fix the leaking roofs. It's crazy.

[Cerridwen]

5. I don't teach; though I would have loved to.

I don't have children of my own.

I could have told them that testing children and teaching them for the test does nothing to enhance learning. It would have taken 5 minutes to pull up all the research on how children learn and in what environment and it would have cost nothing.

[DJ13]

6. And the resulting gradumates end up working for Fox News

:wtf:

[w8liftinglady]

7. My partner and his peers have stated the same thing

they spend so much time trying to coach the kids into fitting a pre-determined mold that they have no time to actually teach.

[madfloridian]

8. Thanks for the link. I could have told them so...

It's been a way for the testing companies to get rich. It's been a way for charters to pop up when schools fail all the useless testing which keeps raising scores when anyone succeeds.

It's not about the kids, it's about the money.

[quaker bill]

9. It was never about improving the schools

It was all about marketing their "failure" to sell the "cure". This is why whenever schools start meeting the standards, the standards are changed. Test validation in this case is when the scores report the desired level of "failure". Any test that reveals too low of a "failure" rate is revised, and minimally the score needed to "pass" is increased. You cannot sell the public on bogus charters and voucher systems if the schools are fine, therefore tests must be administered and "failing" results obtained.

It is a multi billion to perhaps trillion dollar con game. It always was.