Marc Tucker posted two incredibly important articles about testing, from an international perspective.
First, no high performing nation in the world tests every child every year.
Children don’t get smarter because they are tested more often.
Standardized testing is normed on a bell curve. The bottom half of the bell curve has a disproportionate number of children who live in poverty, children who don’t read or speak English, and children with disabilities. The top half has a disproportionate number of children who grow up in stable, secure homes.
The bell curve never closes. It is built into the standardized test. Test makers know in advance how each question will “perform.” The test is designed to produce a bell curve.
The standardized test assesses whether children know the skills and content that are tested. Teacher-made tests assess whether children have learned what they were taught. As we know from Howard Gardner’s work, children have many different abilities; they may not be good at test-taking, but they may be wonderful at making things, doing things, building things, figuring things out, creating things, inventing things.
When Tucker wrote that annual testing did not promote civil rights or narrow achievement gaps, he set off a firestorm of criticism from the reformers (see here and here).
He had evidence on his side. They had ideology. They were wrong. If we hang on to testing and privatization as our weapons to create equity, we will never get there. These are the strategies of the 1% meant to avoid paying a fair share of their vast wealth to close the income inequality gap.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
In science, strongly held ideas must change in the light of disproving evidence. That is why science has driven progress in so many areas. However, in politics, the disconnect between ideology and evidence is resolved by political pressure. In the US the wealthy have amassed enormous political influence. Now, it’s up to citizens to build a unified mass movement strong enough to fight back. That’s all we’ve every had.
Arthur
http://www.arthurcamins.com
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
“Children don’t get smarter because they are tested more often.”
Exactly so.
We used to raise beef cattle. As I said some time ago “We didn’t buy a huge scale and weigh our beef cattle all the time, expecting that this would be the best way to make them gain weight.”
The testing obsession in this country is an obscene waste of time that would be better spent on real instruction. Ranking and rating never improved outcomes for anyone.
LOVE the firestorm of criticism.
For Marc Tucker, certified reformer, to say that these weapons of math destruction “do not promote civil rights or narrow achievement gaps is sweet.” if unexpected.
Thanks to Cathy O’Neal for making the weaponizing of test scores a useful way to speak of their use in education among other contexts.
High stakes testing comes AFTER graduation.
Evidently there were a LOT of people who should never have graduatied.
You said – “These are the strategies of the 1% meant to avoid paying a fair share of their vast wealth to close the income inequality gap.”
I respectfully disagree. These are the strategies of the 1% to make money off the poor and downtrodden, masked by ‘philanthropy’, and a way to ensure that most children will never grow up to be the ‘disrupters’ themselves.