When I questioned why one of my kids did poorly on a 4th grade subtest in social studies several years ago, the school counselor pulled out a copy of the actual ITBS test (same form used every year for several years--that's problematic), reviewed the questions, and identified several topics the school didn't teach. Her stunning response was "Don't worry about the test result. If enough kids get the wrong answers, they will take these questions out of the test."
I lost all respect for normed-referenced tests that day. Normed-reference tests tell me where my child ranks among a certain pool of children, but they don't tell me if that pool is educationally sound or unsound.
National tests, if they were aligned to (based upon) grade-level content standards which were public knowledge and publicly accepted, could be a good thing. They would tell a parent 2 things: first, how much the child had learned compared to the fixed, agreed-upon content standards; and second, how the child ranked against all the other test-takers. That would be valuable information.
But it still wouldn't help me as a consumer unless there were a system to tell me how effective the school was in educating children.
Three problems I see with national tests at this point in time: 1. We have no national consensus on the content (i.e., standards) which should be taught and learned at each grade level. Since some content criteria must be used to create a test and since no national content standards have been publicly adopted, this means that someone is writing content standards nationally behind closed doors. 2. National tests may actually preempt, rather than promote, a necessary and healthy nationwide discussion about education in general and public education in particular. Why discuss what children ought to be learning when someone has already made that decision? 3. The purpose of testing is (at least on one level) to hold schools accountable for the extent to which they successfully educate the students assigned to them. If testing is national, but curricular decisions are local, where is the accountability? The local school will simply say we teach "other" or "better" content than than which the national tests assess. End of discussion, parent/consumer. Now leave, please.
It is the lack of linkage in "what is taught" to "what is tested (learned)" to "what is awarded" that frustrates most of us. In Virginia, for example, "what is taught" has been locally-determined, "what is tested (learned)" has been nationally determined (national norm-referenced tests), and "what is awarded (diplomas/school accreditation)" has been state determined.
We're now trying something different. We've set grade-level content standards in core academic subjects (English, math, science, and history) that all schools throughout the state are required to teach. Criterion-referenced, pass-fail standardized tests have been created to test students against those content standards (administered at grades 3, 5, 8 and end-of-high school courses). The student's test results will be used to determine student awards (promotion and diploma).
The test results will tell parents how the child is doing against very specific content standards. That's important, but insufficient.
If the mark of effective education is that students learn that which is purportedly taught, then Virginia needed a means of gauging whether each school was effectively educating the students assigned to it.
Today, we got that. The State Board today adopted new school accreditation standards which completes the linkage. In the future, Virginia schools will be awarded accreditation ratings based on their effectiveness, i.e., based on the percentage of its students who pass grade/course level tests. By 2003-04, schools must have a 70 percent student pass-rate in order to be accredited. And by 2003-04, students will need to pass between 6 to 9 end-of-course tests to qualify for a diploma. Concurrent accountability for both students and schools seemed only fair. If a student fails too many tests, he loses the diploma. If too many of a school's students don't pass, the school isn't effectively teaching and it loses its accreditation. Now everyone has a vested interest in effectively teaching and learning a common body of knowledge and skills.
Without a system of accountability that focuses everyone on the same thing, a national test is just another test to be debated, disregarded and discarded. And educational consumers continue to lose ground.
EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE
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