Blogger Stonepooch.com explains why high-stakes tests do not provide accountability and undermine the very purpose of education. After a bit of digging, I learned that said blogger has been teaching middle school English for 30 years in public and private schools.

Here is an excerpt:

If you don’t count undeserving people in high places or a burgeoning education reform industry of paid tweeters, bloggers and think tank thinkers, high stakes testing, known ironically as accountability, is currently among the most unaccountable of unaccountable things in American education today. It is unaccountable in the very thing that it purports to account for: the measurement and evaluation of learning, teachers and schools. It does none of these things well.

The most obvious reason for this is that staked testing shifts the priority from what will help a child to what will help the adults that teach her. High stakes advocates will argue that a high stake is the best way to insure that adult and child concerns are identical. But, in practice, this turns out to be untrue. A high stake explicitly reduces the child to evidence of adult performance. Students aren’t first; scores are first.

It’s a simple arithmetic. Most skills in the Common Core (or local variant) are untested; a teacher is valued through skills that are tested. Therefore, tested skills are more important than untested skills regardless of their value to the student. A stake advocate may argue (disingenuously) that a good teacher will always prioritize the student’s need, and that may be true… but only if those needs are not in conflict with the goals established for them by the state. That would be silly.. possibly even insubordinate. A lesson that prioritizes untested skills and opportunities is of low priority interest to administrators and a risk for a teacher whose goal must be to prove her value each year. The best advice to is to remove untested content in order to produce better scores. Test advocates will argue… “oh, but there is all that other criteria that counts in teacher evaluation”, but this too is an invalid argument. Regardless of the quality of other measures, the ultimate measure of the school is in its scores. If test scores are high, the teacher has met the criteria that measures the district, school and principal.

If this sounds like a corruption of mission, it is, and there is loads of evidence that a high stake corrupts the mission of schools …whether through carrot and stick incentives which encourage unethical behavior (Washington DC and Atlanta), through the demoralizing impact of indiscriminate goal setting or through the valuing of students by their scores. This last is especially true for those schools that pick, choose and remove students at will. For such schools, a child who is unlikely or unable to meet a given criteria, or who develops or produces later than the mean, is a risk for all the adults working there. In essence, the state has defined every child as an added measure in support of the teacher, the school or the franchise.

Stonepooch goes on to explain that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain is a good example of the meaninglessness of high-stakes testing. Her students get high scores on state scores, but very few have ever won admission to a selective high school. Why? Preparing for one test does not prepare for other tests. The tests don’t measure anything of lasting importance.

Real accountability begins at the top, not the bottom. The people who control the money control policy. If they don’t like the results, they should change their policies or fire themselves. At the very least, they should take the tests they mandate and publish their scores.