questioning test scores in nyc
An article in the New York Times today recaps a City Hall hearing in New York City. Test scores for the NYC fourth grade English test went up 10 percentage points this year. The question is, why? Mayer Bloomberg and the current director of testing, Dr. Lori Mei, want to say it has everything to do with educational reforms that have been put in place:
…new intervention programs that spot lagging students early, identify deficiencies and provide extra help; the mayor’s mandatory retention program, plus extra resources like summer school to help those students; Saturday academies that prepared students for the tests; the new citywide curriculum; and more professional development for teachers.
Mr. Robert Tobias, a previous testing director for the city, listed some good reasons to be suspicious. With so much test preparation, are kids learning the material or just learning to “beat the test”? More than 900 “English language learners”, students not fluent in English, were exempted this year, eliminating a low-scoring group. Content of the test was more engaging this year, including passages about children’s literature rather than the dry nonfiction passages in the past. This test is also in its 7th year of implementation, and studies have shown that scores inevitably go up as teachers become better at teaching to a particular format. Lastly, since so many districts in the state, not just NYC, are improving, it is possible that it is the scaling of the test rather than education reforms that are pulling test scores up.
I am definitely inclined to agree with Mr. Tobias. There’s just too much reliance placed on these tests, not to mention education reform targeting test results. Are we tending back toward that time when schools were seen as assembly lines, and children as unfinished raw materials to be sent through a machine and some uniform end product to be spat out? Folks who claim that standardized tests are better because they are a reliable and objective measure need to stand back and remember what it is that we are trying to measure here. Is it standardized clones that schools aim to produce? “Reliable and objective” is great for bundling hay or quality assessment of rubbermaids, perhaps. I don’t think it should be the basis of measuring the learning and growth of our children.
The article concludes with this uplifting thought:
Robert Jackson, a councilman, seemed sympathetic to Mr. Tobias, but said that with the election approaching, he needed to know how he could convey such nuanced testing subtleties to voters. “What do I tell them?” he asked.
“If I were you,” said Mr. Tobias, “I’d say test scores are going up.” The room exploded with laughter.
Mr. Tobias was kidding, but everyone knew, come fall, from Staten Island to the Bronx, from Yonkers to Buffalo, that was precisely the sound bite they’d hear on the TV news.
Test Scores Are Up. So Why Isn’t Everybody Cheering? [New York Times Online]
