The Secret Problem With That Testing Column

[n2doc]

By Scott Huler | December 12, 2011



I hope you won’t object to a post not specifically on point about energy or transmission or connectivity. But I think it gets directly at how we understand those topics, so I think it’s worth mentioning.

Everybody has been reading and posting and cross-posting and commenting on this post, in the blog of Valerie Strauss, who writes The Answer Sheet blog for the Washington Post. In it Strauss allows Marion Brady, an educator living in Florida, to guest post, and Brady talks about a friend of his, Rick Roach, on the board of education in Orange County, Florida. He has, as Strauss says, “two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.”

Brady’s post describes how Roach, to better understand the tests his students were constantly having to face, took a “version of the state standardized test and was horrified at what he found,” as Strauss says. Roach says he couldn’t answer a single one of the math questions but was able to guess right on one-sixth of them. He also says on the reading portion of the test he got a score of 62 percent.

The conclusion is simple: the tests make no sense; they test the wrong things; they don’t accurately reflect a student’s capacities, achievements, or aptitude for study. It’s a listing of problems expressing a distrust of the current educational focus on testing that’s familiar — Brady himself wrote a long guest post for Strauss on November 1 2011 on that exact topic, listing the many reasons educators resist test-based programs like No Child Left Behind.


more

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/12/12/the-secret-problem-with-that-testing-column/
Interesting column. Sounds like Roach is an idiot. Maybe a well meaning idiot, but still...