Our reader who calls himself Krazy TA often reminds us that Secretary Duncan was for testing before he was against it, and was against it after he was for it, but is still for it even as he is against it.

Krazy TA writes:

“Arne Duncan. April 30, 2013. His speech to the annual AERA meeting.

The current rebranding is no major shift. This is no minor shift. The words were already out there 2 1/2 years ago. And then, as now, the current administration takes very little responsibility for the consequences of its own policies, mandates and advocacy.

The main problem according to rheephormsters? Somebody, anybody, everybody else.”

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[start excerpt]

… I’d like to discuss the challenges I’ve highlighted about asking hard comparative questions and heeding those counterintuitive outcomes, but with special attention to standardized testing and assessment.

I think we can generally agree that standardized tests don’t have a good reputation today—and that some of the criticism is merited. Policymakers and researchers have to listen very carefully—and take very seriously the concerns of educators, parents, and students about assessment.

At its heart, the argument of the most zealous anti-testing advocates boils down to an argument for abandoning assessment with consequences for students, teachers, or schools.

The critics contend that today’s tests fail to measure students’ abilities to analyze and apply knowledge, that they narrow the curriculum, and that they create too many perverse incentives to cheat or teach to the test. These critics want students and teachers to opt out of all high-stakes testing.

The critics make a number of good points—and they express a lot of the frustration that many teachers feel about today’s standardized tests.

State assessments in mathematics and English often fail to capture the full spectrum of what students know and can do. Students, parents, and educators know there is much more to a sound education than picking the right answer on a multiple choice question.
Many current state assessments tend to focus on easy-to-measure concepts and fill-in-the-bubble answers. Results come back months later, usually after the end of the school year, when their instructional usefulness has expired.

And today’s assessments certainly don’t measures qualities of great teaching that we know make a difference—things like classroom management, teamwork, collaboration, and individualized instruction. They don’t measure the invaluable ability to inspire a love of learning.

Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact. Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.”

Not enough is being done at scale to assess students’ thinking as they learn to boost and enrich learning, and to track student growth. Not enough is being done to use high-quality formative assessments to inform instruction in the classroom on a daily basis.

Too often, teachers have been on their own to pull these tools together—and we’ve seen in the data that the quality of formative tools has been all over the place.

Schools today give lots of tests, sometimes too many. It’s a serious problem if students’ formative experiences and precious time are spent on assessments that aren’t supporting their journey to authentic college- and career-readiness.

[end excerpt]

Read the rest. It’s simply been recycled to serve the political needs du jour.

Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation

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*AERA: American Educational Research Association.