Powerful essay Bob. I am forbidden by my administration to speak aloud my opinions on this topic, especially in front of students. We need to get that 95% of the students to take the exam, you know!
But in private, in the teacher lunch room I still utter the heretical logic you outlined so brilliantly.
Thank you!
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major textbook publishers and most of the standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in the standardized testing industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the validation and standardization procedures used, in the past, with intelligence tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and so on. The mathematics tests are marginally better than are the tests in ELA, US History, and Science, but they are not great. The tests in English Language Arts are truly appalling. A few comments about those:
The…
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What's Gneiss for Education 