Just as the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was passed under bipartisan leadership, so too criticisms of its flawed structure span the gambit of political persuasions. As previously documented, opposition to the NCLB provisions on annual yearly progress (AYP) and school sanctions have raised significant ire from some conservative policy analysts such as Michael J. Petrilli and CATO’s Neal McClusky, as well as representatives from the progressive National Education Association (NEA).
Daniel Koretz, Harvard Professor of Education and author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, recently explained why he believes standards-based testing can yield “bogus” and “absolutely worthless” scores which provide little practical value to society.
“We send kids to school so that they will acquire skills and knowledge that they can use in the workplace and in later education; we don’t send them there to score well on tests,” he argued at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this September. “So if you prepare kids for tests in a way that give them skills that generalize to the real-world context, then you’re doing the right thing and test-based accountability is working as it should be.”
“When somebody here hires kids out of school, they don’t really care whether they came from Maryland or Virginia, and they’re not gonna ask ‘did you do okay on the Maryland test but not the Virginia test,’ they want to know if they know math.”
He pointed to New York City’s recent school “improvement”, where, Koretz argues, grade inflation has caused the city’s schools to magically avoid grades of ‘F’ for this year. Professor Koretz said,
“I don’t know how many of you have been following the fuss in New York City over the last week or two, but New York just released its school progress reports again and they matter. They matter a great deal, but they seem to be, as far as I can tell, largely noise. They’re enormously unreliable. Of the schools that got grades of ‘F’ last year, virtually none got grades below ‘C’ and most got ‘A’s and ‘B’s this year. Well that’s—it’s just there’s no plausible way that this really happened. It’s just noise.”
“So, take error seriously and never treat a score as being more precise and more certain than it is,” he asserted.
Although noting that his book was not intended as an anti-testing “screed,” despite its appeal among some testing opponents, Professor Koretz said that his emphasis remains in placing the merits of testing within a naturally-limited context.
“If you need to use standards, use them, but use them along with other forms of reporting,” he said. Less rigorous assessment produces “illusions of progress,” not real gains.
“So we know that we are creating in many cases, with our test-based accountability systems, illusions of progress, just as people in the testing business predicted 60 years ago,” argued Koretz.
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
