Deborah Meier lowers the boom on the content-and-test people in her Bridging Difference column today. It's worth quoting at some length:
"I discovered, in my effort to 'prep' them, that while reading tests may in part test the ability to read-comprehend (vs. re-code into sounds)-they are even better at detecting one's class and cultural sub-group....
"What you have documented, Diane, is eerily close to the kind of data abuse that helped create our current financial crisis. We go blindly ahead. There seem equally few lessons learned from either crisis. It's apparently easier to hold children and teachers' 'feet to the fire' than the creators of the greatest economic crisis of our lives-especially Harvard grads....
"No evidence exists for most of the Race to the Top-NCLB-like reforms. Just rhetoric. Just more shifting of power away from the public sector. The CREDO study you mention suggests that only 17 percent of the charter schools do better on tests than their comparable noncharters, and more do worse....
"We have alternatives-some pioneered in the good old USA and others in those much-vaunted international comparisons. For example, there is no competitor that relies as much as much as we do on testing of our sort. None. None. None. (A light bulb should go on.)....
"There are no simple magic bullets even among the reforms I like. Partly because we don't all have the same agenda when it comes to outcomes....
"When today's reformers refer to proof of 'achievement they mean something different than you and I do, Diane. Achievement equals standardized test scores in reading and math; others add test scores in other subjects, including aptitude/IQ tests. Everything else gets called 'soft skills.' It's as absurd as calling the written driving test the real achievement and the road test a measure of 'soft' skills....
"We're relying on an absurd definition of achievement-at best. It's not lack of alternatives, but a lack of interest in having real standards that take into account that we are all not the same and that we actually don't want to be all the same."
"I discovered, in my effort to 'prep' them, that while reading tests may in part test the ability to read-comprehend (vs. re-code into sounds)-they are even better at detecting one's class and cultural sub-group....
"What you have documented, Diane, is eerily close to the kind of data abuse that helped create our current financial crisis. We go blindly ahead. There seem equally few lessons learned from either crisis. It's apparently easier to hold children and teachers' 'feet to the fire' than the creators of the greatest economic crisis of our lives-especially Harvard grads....
"No evidence exists for most of the Race to the Top-NCLB-like reforms. Just rhetoric. Just more shifting of power away from the public sector. The CREDO study you mention suggests that only 17 percent of the charter schools do better on tests than their comparable noncharters, and more do worse....
"We have alternatives-some pioneered in the good old USA and others in those much-vaunted international comparisons. For example, there is no competitor that relies as much as much as we do on testing of our sort. None. None. None. (A light bulb should go on.)....
"There are no simple magic bullets even among the reforms I like. Partly because we don't all have the same agenda when it comes to outcomes....
"When today's reformers refer to proof of 'achievement they mean something different than you and I do, Diane. Achievement equals standardized test scores in reading and math; others add test scores in other subjects, including aptitude/IQ tests. Everything else gets called 'soft skills.' It's as absurd as calling the written driving test the real achievement and the road test a measure of 'soft' skills....
"We're relying on an absurd definition of achievement-at best. It's not lack of alternatives, but a lack of interest in having real standards that take into account that we are all not the same and that we actually don't want to be all the same."
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