As a parent and a school board member, test scores are about the only thing I pay attention to right now. It's not that they're perfect, in the sense of measuring everything that a student should learn at school. But, unlike GPAs or high school graduation rates, they're objective. Kids in one district are taking the same exam as in another, and next year they'll take the same exam as this year. There's nothing else in the school systems that provides this kind of information.
That said, the predictive power of test scores is also depressing in that it shows how limited schools' ability to alter students' educational paths appears to be. If a student scores toward the bottom in 3rd grade, our goal should be to lift them up and change that path in later years. The fact that test scores are so strongly predictive implies our ability to do that isn't huge. Now, maybe the students' percentile isn't the right thing to measure, versus straight up improvements in ability. Still, that 3rd grade scores largely tell you high school scores is kind of sad.
As I stumbled across your page, and this post, I don't mind saying standardized tests are horrid. Yesterday I watched a kid sleep through an entire morning of it. Just hard core sleep. Since we don't hold kids back these days, he will slide on from my class to high school next year. Testing? Grades? All meaningless.
A comment section isn't the place for a long-winded diatribe, I suppose. Not even the place for a medium-winded diatribe. But the curriculum narrowing from testing, among other impacts, has always been sickening.
I agree! As a public school teacher, I’m in the minority here, but I don’t think standardized tests are horrible. With lower teacher expectations and grade inflation, tests might be more useful that ever in the next few years
As a parent and a school board member, test scores are about the only thing I pay attention to right now. It's not that they're perfect, in the sense of measuring everything that a student should learn at school. But, unlike GPAs or high school graduation rates, they're objective. Kids in one district are taking the same exam as in another, and next year they'll take the same exam as this year. There's nothing else in the school systems that provides this kind of information.
That said, the predictive power of test scores is also depressing in that it shows how limited schools' ability to alter students' educational paths appears to be. If a student scores toward the bottom in 3rd grade, our goal should be to lift them up and change that path in later years. The fact that test scores are so strongly predictive implies our ability to do that isn't huge. Now, maybe the students' percentile isn't the right thing to measure, versus straight up improvements in ability. Still, that 3rd grade scores largely tell you high school scores is kind of sad.
As I stumbled across your page, and this post, I don't mind saying standardized tests are horrid. Yesterday I watched a kid sleep through an entire morning of it. Just hard core sleep. Since we don't hold kids back these days, he will slide on from my class to high school next year. Testing? Grades? All meaningless.
A comment section isn't the place for a long-winded diatribe, I suppose. Not even the place for a medium-winded diatribe. But the curriculum narrowing from testing, among other impacts, has always been sickening.
I agree! As a public school teacher, I’m in the minority here, but I don’t think standardized tests are horrible. With lower teacher expectations and grade inflation, tests might be more useful that ever in the next few years