Gene Glass, Emeritus Professor at ASU, Professor at University of Colorado Boulder and Fellow at the National Education Policy Center, wrote in a blog post Monday,
Recently I asked my dean to switch my affiliation from the measurement program to the policy program. I am no longer comfortable being associated with the discipline of educational measurement.
Glass has been involved in psychometric work and research since 1960, during a time when “psychometrics promised it could win . . . the wars on poverty and ignorance.” It never quite realized that promise. Worse, it has become a tool used against public education.
Measurement has changed along with the nation. In the last three decades, the public has largely withdrawn its commitment to public education. The reasons are multiple: those who pay for public schools have less money, and those served by the public schools look less and less like those paying taxes.
The degrading of public education has involved impugning its effectiveness, cutting its budget, and busting its unions. Educational measurement has been the perfect tool for accomplishing all three: cheap and scientific looking.
International tests have purported to prove that America’s schools are inefficient or run by lazy incompetents. Paper-and-pencil tests seemingly show that kids in private schools – funded by parents – are smarter than kids in public schools. We’ll get to the top, so the story goes, if we test a teacher’s students in September and June and fire that teacher if the gains aren’t great enough.
There has been resistance, of course. Teachers and many parents understand that children’s development is far too complex to capture with an hour or two taking a standardized test. So resistance has been met with legislated mandates. The test company lobbyists convince politicians that grading teachers and schools is as easy as grading cuts of meat. A huge publishing company from the UK has spent $8 million in the past decade lobbying Congress. Politicians believe that testing must be the cornerstone of any education policy.
The results of this cronyism between corporations and politicians have been chaotic. Parents see the stress placed on their children and report them sick on test day. Educators, under pressure they see as illegitimate, break the rules imposed on them by governments. Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside and drill children on how to score high on multiple-choice tests. And too many of the best teachers exit the profession.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.
It is so easy to criticize the efficacy of Student Standard Assessment Examinations in measuring if Students are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the required body of information per Subject Area without offering alternative strategies. Principal evaluations are subjective, limited, and of no real value. Classroom instructional heterogeneity requires an objective measure.
As stated in this Article: “….Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside and drill children on how to score high on multiple-choice tests. …”
“Teaching to the Test” is a bogus argument. In fact, if the Curriculum/Assessment Examination covers the necessary body of information per Subject Area required for a Student to achieve their Career Goals, then by all mean…Teach to the Test!!!
In his first Annual Address to Congress on January 8, 1790, President Washington said that Education was “the security of a free Constitution”…that, through Education a free people would know and value “their own rights”…..and would be able “to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness”.
Public Education: “…To assure each one the facility of perfecting his skill…..Those talents with which Nature has endowed him; and thereby to establish among all citizens an actual equality, thus rendering real the political equality recognized by the law. This should be the first aim of any national education…an obligation of justice.” (Condorcet, 1792)
Local Control of Public Education, generally, has been a dismal failure!!…hence the move, by Parents, of their Children, to Charter/Private Schools. We need to turn this around via a National Curriculum/Assessment Examinations.
This is very welcome news. As more experts pull back the curtain and admit that the tests are NOT a valid measure of whether students are receiving a good education, we can dispense with the sham that has been created around high-stakes testing. If the tests don’t measure what they are supposed to measure, then everything built on the basis of that supposed validity falls like a house of cards. School and districts letter grades go first. You have to be really gullible to believe that the letter grade based mostly on testing tells you what you need to know about making a choice for your child. Unfortunately, the grade is so easy to understand that people fall for it. (It was designed to be easy, because real evaluation is complicated.)
So true. It’s not the schools and teachers that are failing. Policy makers and policies are failing our schools.
Thanks for this excellent post, David, and for your ongoing efforts to raise public awareness on this. It’s sad that we’ve reached a point where some people whose views of schooling have been formed since the onset of NCLB don’t seem to show any awareness that “education” should be more than skill, drill, PRE-TEST, TEST, RE-TEST, & repeat. Very sad for the 80% of this generation that has received education in contexts where federal policy has forced this to become the norm.