For years, I’ve told audiences that one of my biggest fantasies (not involving Heidi Klum) was that we would have a different kind of testing and accountability system. In my make-believe world, teachers and principals would never get to see the tests – under penalty of death.
They wouldn’t be allowed within miles of a school on testing days, and they would only be given general information about the results (e.g., “your class was in the bottom quintile of fourth grades in reading”). Telling a teacher the kinds of test questions or about the formatting would be punished severely, too.
In that fantasy, teachers would be expected to try to improve student reading scores by… well, by teaching kids to read without regard to how it might be measured later. I have even mused that it would be neat if the test format changed annually to even discourage teachers from thinking about teaching to a test format.
In some ways, because of common core, my fantasy is coming true (maybe Heidi K. isn’t far behind?).
Principals and teachers aren’t sure what these tests look like right now. The whole system has been reset, and the only sensible solution is… teaching.
And, yet, I am seeing states that are holding back on rolling out the common core until they can see the test formats.
Last week, Cyndie (my wife – yes, she knows all about Heidi and me – surprisingly, she doesn’t seem nervous about it) was contacted by a state department of education trying to see if she had any inside dope on the PARCC test.
This is crazy. We finally have a chance to raise achievement and these test-chasing bozos are working hard to put us back in the ditch. There is no reason to believe that you will make appreciable or reliable gains teaching kids to reply to certain kinds of test questions or to particular test formats (you can look it up). The people who push such plans know very little about education (can they show you the studies of their “successful” test-teaching approaches?). I am very pleased with the unsettled situation in which teachers and principals don’t know how the children’s reading is going to be evaluated; it is a great opportunity for teachers and kids to show what they can really do.
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