During the nearly 15 years I toiled in the standardized testing industry, most of my time was spent scoring student responses to the open-ended questions on state assessments, or training others to do the same. Because of that experience, I'm amazed today to hear the suggestion that the jobs and salaries of American teachers should, in part, be based on how well their students do on standardized tests. No more than a couple examples from my time in testing indicate how unwise a decision that might be.
To begin, in my assessment career, we always went out of our way to differentiate between "scoring" and "grading," which in my mind always differentiated between testing and teaching. "Scoring isn't the same as grading," I heard dozens of times in my career.
The speech was always the same. "When grading a student's work," some testing company flack (perhaps me) would say, "A teacher might consider more than just how the student answered a question. The teacher might not give out a grade before also taking into account how much effort the student was putting in, how much improvement he or she was making, how much time was spent studying a subject, or how well other students answered the question. In scoring student responses on these tests, however, all we care about is how the words written on the page match up with our scoring rubric."
"Remember that scoring," the speech always concluded, "is not the same as grading!"
That speech was usually given during a project only after one (or more) of the scorers began to protest that the job they were being asked to do was too one-dimensional, complaining that test "scoring" didn't adequately deal with complex student answers. The disgruntled scorers argued that it was too superficial. The "scoring v. grading" speech was unveiled mostly in order to assuage those scorers' fears by promising them the "scoring" of student answers on large-scale assessments was only supposed to be a quick measure of student work, not anything as deep or meaningful as the real decisions professional educators made about students every day.
So, you can imagine my surprise -- while we, in large-scale assessment once used to produce results only with the caveat that they weren't as robust a measure of student learning as were the grades teachers meted out, now those simplistic scores the testing industry spits out by the millions were going to be used to assess those very teachers. I have to admit, I didn't see that coming.
This second reality about testing and teaching is a little embarrassing to admit, but during my time in testing, the absolute worst people hired to score student responses were classroom teachers, active or former. In truth, that's a statement more about the kind of job test scoring is than it is a commentary on the abilities of the many capable teachers I worked with. But neither I nor many of my colleagues in the testing industry relished the idea of classroom teachers in our pool of test scorers.
The tendency those current or former educators have of giving thoughtful readings to student responses was, frankly, the bane of my existence as a trainer. If I was standing in front of a group of 20, 50 or 100 temporary employees newly hired to score tests, and if we had to get through 100,000 student responses in two weeks, the last thing I needed was for each of those scorers to be giving a meticulous and earnest review to every student response.
Meticulous and earnest reviews of every student response meant the scorers might never agree with each other (one scorer might find some esoteric nugget of wisdom in a single word of the first sentence, while perhaps another would find some major fault in the second), and the scorers agreeing with each other was the primary goal of "standardized" test scoring. When I was a trainer, I didn't need my scorers spending five minutes to look for the hidden truth in every response; I needed them to look for key words and slap down a quick score. People who cared too much (teachers and ex-teachers) were certainly not the people who helped most in that regard, and hence I usually found myself hoping for a team of scorers that wasn't too invested in the state of American education.
To reiterate, teachers and ex-teachers made bad standardized test scorers because they actually gave a damn about the students, while my scoring projects were usually better served by people who cared a little less. Ironically, that means if test scores do end up being used to evaluate the jobs being done by American teachers, those people who "cared a little less" will end up assessing the jobs being done by those classroom teachers who really are invested in American education.
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Any charismatic person could "inspire" his or her students to put in a ton of effort only to fail horribly because the teacher was incapable of getting them to actually grasp the material.
The suggestion that teachers should grade based on effort or improvement leads to horrible unintended consequences. For example...
Bob is at the airport waiting for his flight. He goes to the ATM but all of the ATMs are down because the programmers failed to recognize a flaw in the code -- but don't worry because those programmers used to be really crappy programmers and then they improved into only crappy programmers.
After Bob flight begins, he eats his meal and then starts feeling sick. It turns out that a worker at the food processing plant was incompetent and did not provide the appropriate mixture of preservartives -- but don't worry, because that worker takes his job home and studies alot at night even though he has a very very diffiuclt time learning new information.
When the plane starts to descend unexpectedly, Bob wanders about the engineer who failed to account for the complicated interaction of wind and temperature that causes the failure of a crucial navigation component -- but Bob is OK with that because the engineer tried so darn hard.
Of course, standardized tests are not perfect, but they do provide a reasonable measurement of competence. We can argue about how these tests should be constructed, but to argue that they are useless is pretty foolish.
And, of course, evaluating students by the test score of their students has its problems, although the most widely recognized way of doing this is with a value-added approach which looks at change in scores to accommodate student deficiencies.
Then take a look at the inschool political ramifications. Among educators there are some good principals. Today the word principal is anathema to principals. The original British term of "principal" was academic leader. Principals today prefer to be called administrators, therefore divesting themselves of having anything to do with the classroom. Scheduling is done by administrators. A good teacher who may not see eye to eye with an administrator, for whatever reason, can be saddled with more problem students than a teacher who might be termed the teacher's pet.
America can do anything it wants to try and fix it's education system. But until the country as a whole puts a REAL effort in, and changes it's paradigms in a radical way about what schooling really entails. Then they'll never get it. There's simply things that the American curriculum does not accomadate. They have no classes in community or morals. No teaching of delayed gratification in a world that's constantly invading minds for precious advertising space. It's not just how we're teaching, it's what we're teaching that's wrong as well.
The people who support the Corporations that have forced this on the Education system
Why should teacher's salary be based on standardized test scores that don't mean anything to the student? There are no consequences if the student misses every question..............because of social promotion they will be promoted to the next grade level no matter what. Being promoted is all they care about.............being able to stay in the same class with their friends. The student gets rewarded and the teacher has to suffer............????
The test has no meaning to students!!
That is not what assessment has become in this day and age in our school systems. Instead, we have administrators who are hell bent on getting the scores necessary to keep funding flowing. As such, they are directing the teachers to teach to these assessments with little left over during the year to focus on the deep learning that needs to happen.
What is worse, this only passes only the same sense of understanding at the collegiate level and into the business world. Having taught at the college level and work in the business area, I have been amazed at how skills such as analytical thinking or critical thinking have gone away and replaced with simple multiple choice and true/false tests, which are really only best for fact based learning.
Many students are given a solid foundation of this learning. It is not necessarily the fault of the teachers who are stretched so thin to cover so much, but the lack of direction our education system moves. Add to that, the publishers who provide the content that is nothing more than facts or opinion to be regurgitated for the same tests they make.
Thanks.