Steve Nelson declares flatly that:
Assessment may be the most damaging concept in contemporary education debate.
Education reform is obsessed with assessment and accountability. Whether in the form of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, or the slightly more reasonable Common Core, billions of dollars are devoted to defining what kids should know and then assessing whether they know it. I won’t waste my keystrokes or your time reiterating the evils of the testing and assessment industry. Lots of folks have done that quite thoroughly.
Most thoughtful educational commentary suggests how assessments might be better. I, like many others, have pointed out the foolishness of many exams based on the Common Core. Appropriately, the phrase “fill in the bubble” has become shorthand for poor educational practice.
I don’t think the criticisms go nearly far enough. There is no need for these assessments at all.
What do we learn from these standardized tests?
Aggregate test results in any school or district reveal these three things:
1. The wealth or poverty of the school or district.
and/or
2. The extent to which the school or district skewed its curriculum and teaching practices toward the service of elevating test scores.
and/or
3. The extent to which the school or district assembled, through selective/deceptive enrollment practices or geographic luck, a group of students who were more likely to do well on the tests.
And these are the factors on which we are basing policy and demoralizing a generation of kids and, particularly, teachers!
Here is a thought:
Real education reform will come when, and only when, we address poverty, fund schools properly and honor the teaching profession with good pay and the respect teachers deserve.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
and/or
4. The extent to which the school or district cheated.
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I would either add to or replace demoralizing with demonizing. Satan himself couldn’t come with a more punishing system than what today’s teachers face.
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I couldn’t have said it better. I will end my teaching career in two years. I will never look back. The abuse that teachers face day to day is exhausting, demoralizing, and driven by evil. So very well said!
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At least you can make it another two years! I quit teaching mathematics in an urban high school this past year (I made it four years). I can’t look back to teaching in these times, but I do miss it – I miss what a career in teaching could have been. I had to fight for my students to receive a high quality education, and boy did I fight! The kiddos received a great education as a result and I am so proud of the work my kiddos put in! They really were behind in content knowledge (which standardized tests didn’t need to tell me), but TEACHING and LEARNING occurred in the classroom, bringing the kids up to speed. Oh, and even though I didn’t “drill and kill” ACT concepts to my junior classes, their ACT scores increased an average of 3 points during the time I taught them. I was thanked for increasing their test scores but not thanked for teaching these kiddos a rigorous mathematics curriculum that will set them up for success in mathematics courses that will follow. Unfortunately, this fighting/advocating burned me out. I quit teaching to accept a position engineering, but will forever be thankful I was able to affect the outcome of many of my former students.
I will miss my teaching experience, but simply need the education climate to change before I decide to go back. This includes much higher salaries, respect, and allowing actual T&L to occur.
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Former Teacher, Believe me, your students will never forget you. How blessed your students were to have you! They will be grateful they had you as they sit in their Math classes in college. I am praying and hoping the climate changes for teachers. It was once a wonderful, very rewarding profession. 😊
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The greatest harm to the practice of education has been for almost a century delivered thru measurement psychology. It’s become embedded in an industry arising from an academic field that parallels the scope of societal harms created by tobacco and handgun industries.
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Sadly, as a person with a BA and MA in Psychology, I have to agree with you. I was a great believer in the powers of psychometrics until I married a foreign-born black man – one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but he’s hopeless when it comes to tests. I, on the other hand, can ace standardized tests. But I can’t actually do half of what he can – his social and mechanical intelligences far outstrip mine, both of which are much more practical. It’s made me re-think so much of the snobbery I grew up with.
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So very TRUE, Mike.
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Wow, the typical question arises as to whether Steve Calhoun doesn’t understand VAMs or whether he is intentionally misleading his audience once again. His points in order:
1. Test score measure the affluence of the school district. This is true about achievement scores but completely false about VAMs or growth scores compared against similar students. We understand that some students (be it parental income, culture or IQ) will score lower on the achievement tests. We are not asking teachers to correct that gap. But we must expect every child to achieve growth.
2 He claims “skewed test practices” are what generate test score gains. This is false. According to the Gates’ MET study, the teachers with the highest VAMs were deemed by their own students not to have taught to the test. Thus, “teaching to the test” is not skewing the results but a misunderstanding by teachers and administrators about how to generate better performance. One needs to focus on the process of teaching and better results will naturally follow. For example, an Olympic diver is concerned about the amount of splash they make in the pool. But rather than worry about not being completely vertical upon entry (the immediate cause of the splash), the diver worries about the overall progression of the dive in the air and off the board. If the diver performs the initial steps correctly, he/she will be in position to be able to make a vertical entry at the end. If teachers instruct their students effectively, scores and VAMs take care of themselves.
3. Once again, VAMs don’t measure absolute scores but relative growth among similar kids. For those who say their students don’t try, imagine what your scores would be if those lethargic kids did try. They wouldn’t even have to score well but simply try to get an outstanding VAM. Can you inspire kids to try? Great teachers do every day.
Steve is just another example of an educator looking for any excuse possible to avoid accountability. If folks like Steve invested half as much time in perfecting the instructional methods of their teachers as they do whining about having to be accountable, imagine how much improvement could be generated.
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Calhoun? Who!? Aren’t you mis-recognizing him for someone?? No matter what explanation you try to make, it doesn’t change the fact that VAM is a systematically flawed model designed for phony teacher evaluation–not for students.
No other country has ever adopted it–even in Japan, China or South Korea.
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I have 35 years of teaching experience and I agree with every word Steve wrote.
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