Jersey Jazzman (aka Mark Weber) explains how standardized tests are designed and how they function in real life.
Standardized tests are designed to produce a normal curve. Most students are in the middle. The curve accurately reflects socioeconomic status. If states use proficiency levels instead, those levels are completely arbitrary. They can be moved up or down, as the leaders choose, to demonstrate progress or failure.
That’s why it is puzzling that civil rights groups are supporting annual standardized testing in Federal law. It wastes money, labels the neediest kids as failures year after year, provides no helpful information, has no diagnostic value, and benefits no one but the testing corporations and the reformsters who are eager to privatize public schools by waving around low scores and gaps.
JJ writes:
“The correlation between socio-economic status and test scores is absolutely iron-clad. Does anyone think eliminating the ceiling effect is going to change this? Granted, there is likely a ceiling on how income effects test scores: a kid in a family making $300K a year probably isn’t at much, if any, disadvantage compared to a kid in a family making $500K.
“But the wealthy have always enjoyed an advantage in our false meritocracy. The biases in the tests themselves, coupled with the inequitable distribution of resources available for schools, all but guarantee the majority of the variation in test scores will be explained by class.
“The neo-liberal view appears to be that this is inevitable and just, so long as we decouple these inequities from race. If we can get some more students of color into elite schools, and create a few more black and brown millionaires and billionaires, everything will be “fair.” The owners of the country can then sleep soundly at night, content that they may be classists, but they aren’t racists.
“I’m all for social mobility, but increasing it isn’t the same as decreasing inequity. There are millions of people in this county doing difficult, necessary jobs. It’s wrong to consign people of color to these jobs through a system of social reproduction in our schools. But it’s also wrong to pretend that we have a system where everybody can be above average, and in doing so can make a better life for themselves.
“So long as we keep making bell curves, somebody has to be on the left side. Somebody has to do the work that needs to get done. But there’s no reason those decent, hardworking people shouldn’t have good wages and good medical care and good housing and disposable income and workplace rights and time to spend raising their children.”
He wonders what would happen if we stopped using the bell curve.
Don’t you?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The “Bell Curve” is a red herring. The raw data, the actual marks, will almost never follow a “Normal Distribution” (the technical term for the bell curve). It is impossible to design a test to achieve this, even after years of running the test. What happens out there is that the raw score data is rescaled so that a normal distribution is obtained. This happens with intelligence tests as well. Then it is easy to read off the scaled score corresponding to the desired cutoff percentage, and as they say in England “Bob’s your uncle”, job done.
Also, politicians know that people are stupid, and will think that having all students “above average” is a wonderful (and realistic) target.
“I’m all for social mobility, but increasing it isn’t the same as decreasing inequity.” Jersey Jazzman should explain this statement to various civil rights groups that support more testing as well as our president. They seem to miss this important point.
The whole high stakes testing industry is a red herring. It is ridiculous the heaps of money schools are forced to spend on testing and yes only to reveal the one constant… if you are rich you do better than if you are poor (all the while those CEO’s and fat cats involved in the testing industry keep getting richer and richer). How ironic that Ed Week has an article that attempts to reveal how incredibly well run, organized and specialized the scoring process is in regards to the PARCC and SBAC tests. In reality it is a generic employee mill where anyone with a “breath” and willing to go through their “rigorous” training process can be a scorer from unemployed business execs to recent university students receiving their BA’s. Telling… they offer more money to certified teachers to score but have a very low number of actual certified teachers scoring these insidious tests! What a national disgrace.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/20/thousands-of-scorers-take-on-the-common-core.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1-RM