Ahhhh, Monday!
Sashma (welcome to the discussion, Sashma--I'm delighted to have another teacher join in) wanted to talk more about standardized testing. Obviously, the importance of scores from these tests have been greatly magnified in the last ten or fifteen years. When I was in school, I remember having to take the ITBS for several years, and then, as I recall, standardized tests kind of went away until ACT's or SAT's came up in the latter part of high school (I graduated in 1972, for what it's worth). Since then, those tests have grown in focus and importance until, today, they have become the Great Almighty Determiner of the Quality of Education in Schools Today (aka GADQEST, an acronym I just made up). Every state has its version of (drum roll, please)...The Test. Colorado's is the CSAP, and in Colorado, if scores are not sufficiently high in a school district, that district (or a school in that district) can be given what amounts to sanctions in the form of loss of funding, disaccreditatation, etc. Now, to me, that makes no sense whatsoever. Schools in trouble need more help--not sanctions.
The superintendent of our district recently addressed the issue of CSAPs this way: he said that while tests like these do serve a purpose--do have importance--there is no doubt that their importance has been greatly exaggerated; he went on to say that the tests should be used to provide a snapshot to educators that can further be used to start a dialogue about some of the areas of concern in our methods or areas of instruction (which, by the way, is how our high school has always used CSAP results). While I agree with this assertion, I would say that the tests and results have now become the final point of the conversation. Results are being used to prove that education is failing on the whole, a purpose for which I know the tests were never intended, and now believe is part of a fairly obvious agenda put forth by a growing number of politicians and entrepreneurs. There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in the business of education, and there is hardly a shortage of people waiting to exploit this opportunity, even if it means destroying the institution of public education as we know it. Indeed, there's a pretty large number of them who make no bones about that being their goal--to bring down public education as it's practiced today.  And they're using standardized test scores to do it. At every level of government, the almighty test score is being used as the be-all, end-all measure of the quality of education in our schools.
Oh, if only it were that simple (never, ever has been, and never, ever can be)! If only someone could design the perfect test that demonstrates exactly what students know and don't know. And here's one of the dangerous pitfalls of that "if only:" the companies that create these tests, under contract from state and federal governments, are now claiming that their tests do function that well, and never mind that everyone within the educational community knows otherwise. We know that there is absolutely no test that can fully measure what a student is learning, that the evidence from these things has to come from a wide range of factors that cannot be accurately measured by a standardized test. And here's the catch: government knows this, too. Eternally frustrated by the infuriating reality that education is not something that can be accurately measured by any instrument they can devise, they have launched this massive effort to overhaul education into something that does fit into their neat little container. But to do that, they first have to convince us of the viability of test scores as an indicator of student progress--wait, check that; not an indicator--the indicator. And this is where we see the federal government inexorably creeping in to areas that are far better left to state and local concerns. The Bush administration's No Child Left Behind is a noble idea (you can just tell it by its noble sounding name!), but it was terribly ill-conceived and based on a mountain of fallacious benchmarks--all of them tied to the nationwide requirement of all districts to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress" as defined by--you guessed it--standardized test scores. Taking this one step further, no one seems to mind that, in essence, it is the school that is being measured--not the students. Test results are based on current school population from year to year without factoring in the vast number of students who come and go in every school district every year (especially in  areas that have large  militarty populations). This would be like a doctor telling his patient that he has high cholesterol, so the doctor wants him to be tested again next year...but in the event he can't make it to be tested, he can send his sister, and they'll look at her results! Obama has done no better (perhaps I should say here that I voted for Obama). In fact, far from recognizing the inability of federal programs to address educational concerns adequately or accurately (after all, how can you adequately address what you cannot accurately assess?), Obama is throwing billions of dollars in federal monies to those states--and only those states--who can show that they are ready to play the education game his way. He has put states into the position of competing against each other for boatloads of temporary funding; Colorado was one of the finalists for a piece of that pie (only to lose out in the final allocation), and the changes that Colorado made in its legislation governing how teachers shall now be assessed--changes all made in an effort lure that temporary money into our state coffers--has, I predict, done inestimable damage to our state's system of education. Teachers in Colorado are now no longer protected under a tenure system--a system that did have its flaws, but was the only system that allowed teachers the security to do their jobs without feeling threatened by capricious or inexpert assessments by administrators who often hold personal grudges or have differing philosophies about things that do not measure quality of education. With those safeguards removed, administrators now are free to evaluate teachers using--once again--standardized test scores as the primary basis for their evaluations. I absolutely shudder at the implications. It's one of the things that make me believe that I am leaving this profession at precisely the right time. And the Colorado public is buying into it, hook, line, and sinker because they apparently just don't know any better.  It saddens me and sickens me more than I can possibly say.