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TEST WRITERS FLUNK ANOTHER TEST
Washington Post Blog - This really happened . . . Second grade. Everglades Elementary School in Miami. Mrs. Hirsch, my classroom teacher, passed out the first standardized test I had ever taken. I took the exam and thought I had done well.
I hadn't.
In fact, I got every answer wrong.
How does a good student from a highly educated middle-class background do that in second grade?
I was supposed to circle only one answer, as most multiple-choice problems require. I picked more than one and then annotated the answers in the margins.
Here's an example:
Q) Grass is:
A) green B) brown C) yellow
This was a flawed question in my second-grade eyes.
Our grass was often all three colors. It baked in the hot Miami sun, and our sprinkler system did not reach all corners of the small lot. Also, the chinch bugs loved to eat it. I circled all three and explained all of this.
The teachers -- who actually were terrific -- diagnosed my test results as "over-comprehension." I was, they said, reading too much into everything. They put me in a reading group that they thought would teach me to think in more concrete terms.
They soon realized that the test was silly, and after reviewing it, the principal, Mrs. Kazer, decided to junk it, calling it poorly conceived.
That was in the 1960s. Unfortunately, today's policymakers don't have the wisdom that Mrs. Kazer showed back then. They have thrust us into an age of high-stakes tests, whose results can influence the life of a teacher or a student -- or the fate of a school -- even though experts on testing say these tests are not particularly sophisticated and often biased.
Many educators who lived through the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program, which put high-stakes tests at the forefront of public education, had hoped that President Obama and Duncan would realize the pitfalls of standardized testing.
They haven't -- and many folks are disappointed, even angry.
Now we have the spectacle of Duncan on an "education tour" with Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton to trumpet Obama's education program, "Race to the Top," which has been called "No Child Left Behind on steroids."
Herbert Kohl, author of a book on education that Duncan has said was instrumental in his thinking, issued an open letter this summer blasting the education secretary for promoting the importance of standardized tests.
Kohl wrote: "Recently I asked a number of elementary school students what they were learning about and the reactions were consistently, 'We are learning how to do good on the tests.' They did not say they were learning to read."
I hadn't.
In fact, I got every answer wrong.
How does a good student from a highly educated middle-class background do that in second grade?
I was supposed to circle only one answer, as most multiple-choice problems require. I picked more than one and then annotated the answers in the margins.
Here's an example:
Q) Grass is:
A) green B) brown C) yellow
This was a flawed question in my second-grade eyes.
Our grass was often all three colors. It baked in the hot Miami sun, and our sprinkler system did not reach all corners of the small lot. Also, the chinch bugs loved to eat it. I circled all three and explained all of this.
The teachers -- who actually were terrific -- diagnosed my test results as "over-comprehension." I was, they said, reading too much into everything. They put me in a reading group that they thought would teach me to think in more concrete terms.
They soon realized that the test was silly, and after reviewing it, the principal, Mrs. Kazer, decided to junk it, calling it poorly conceived.
That was in the 1960s. Unfortunately, today's policymakers don't have the wisdom that Mrs. Kazer showed back then. They have thrust us into an age of high-stakes tests, whose results can influence the life of a teacher or a student -- or the fate of a school -- even though experts on testing say these tests are not particularly sophisticated and often biased.
Many educators who lived through the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program, which put high-stakes tests at the forefront of public education, had hoped that President Obama and Duncan would realize the pitfalls of standardized testing.
They haven't -- and many folks are disappointed, even angry.
Now we have the spectacle of Duncan on an "education tour" with Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton to trumpet Obama's education program, "Race to the Top," which has been called "No Child Left Behind on steroids."
Herbert Kohl, author of a book on education that Duncan has said was instrumental in his thinking, issued an open letter this summer blasting the education secretary for promoting the importance of standardized tests.
Kohl wrote: "Recently I asked a number of elementary school students what they were learning about and the reactions were consistently, 'We are learning how to do good on the tests.' They did not say they were learning to read."
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