Obsession with Standardized Tests Is a Traversty

I couldn't agree more, based upon 31 years experience in high school teaching. Merit pay based on student test scores rears its ugly head every 15-20 years or so. (Do you remember Lamar Alexander's disaster in Tennessee some time back?)

When I was department head of a department of 18 teachers back in the early 1980's when merit pay based on test scores reared its ugly head in our division, my department made a suggestion to the superintendent who was pushing for such a program: Let us give our student a pre-test at the beginning of the semester and a post-test at the end of the semester. We pledged to use the latest teaching methods based upon research and learning theory. Then, if 70-80% of our students did not show improvement, we would forfeit our step raises.

The idea went absolutely nowhere. We were told it would cost too much to test twice, that a 70-80% improvement rate wasn't good enough, that a percentage gain in improvement would have to be determined and that would be "arbitrary."

As if it isn't arbitrary to make one (always multiple choice for cheap and easy scoring) test the determinant of what a student has learned!

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by: Elaine in Roanoke @ Sat Sep 05, 2009 at 08:22:42 AM CDT