To hold teachers 100% responsible when they can account for only “10 percent of the variability in student test scores” is insane, especially in light of the fact that other factors such as “family income and education levels” account for 90% of the variability.

Supremely confident about all the positives of this policy (e.g., teachers and students working harder, scores rising), top decision-makers have not done due diligence on what experts in testing have said repeatedly about using test scores to evaluate individual teachers (see here and here) and the history of previous efforts to reward teachers on student performance. Had they done so, they might have heeded the record of perverse outcomes that have accrued to such policies. On this issue, then, smart people do dumb things.

Hanushek, an economist, claims that the .08 standard deviation increase in student learning is not as insignificant as the report makes it sound. According to his calculations, the benefits of such gains outweigh the costs: that amount of learning, he claims, translates to a value of $14 trillion. He notes that if testing is expanded at the expense of $100 per student, the rate of return on that investment is 9,189 percent.

1. Hanushek claiming others' research conclusions are biased is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

2. See http://goo.gl/OB8Jw for how to interpret standard deviation sizes

From John Dewey to Jean Piaget, educators have generally agreed that while didactic teaching has its place, small children learn mainly from interacting and not passive listening, understanding and not memorizing, reading for fun and not simply decoding. "The good news," says Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, "is that children can be taught basic academic skills - fundamentals of reading, writing and mathematics - in a way that uses, rather than destroys, their natural desire to learn. Vocabulary can be taught by conversation, awareness of print developed through reading and talking about books and mathematics learned with games like a pretend restaurant."

Drill-and-skill is not how middle-class children got their edge, Dean Stipek says, so "why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

Emerging research in the education world suggests that a tougher approach to high school academics might leave students no better prepared for college and work, while also increasing the number of high school dropouts. The National Research Council concluded that high school exit exams have decreased high school graduation rates in the United States by 2 percentage points without increasing achievement. In Chicago, a 2010 study found no positive effects on student achievement from a school reform measure that ended remedial classes and required college preparatory course work for all students. High school graduation rates declined, and there was no improvement in college enrollment and retention rates among students who did graduate.

To truly develop academic discipline, policy makers must first abandon the confusion between a lot of work and hard work. “Covering content,” copious amounts of it, is not learning. It is a lot of work, but it is mind-numbing. It certainly does not render a student “college-ready.” In fact, the vast majority of college professors complain that students arrive at college completely unprepared to do college level research and writing.

Rather than develop new standardized tests, we would serve our children better by giving them the opportunity to do some hard work.

What exactly do you have in mind, pedagogically speaking, beyond bullying teachers and kids to get higher scores on bad tests?

What are we doing with our assessment data now? Who works with it? Does it affect anything?

Yes, I do consider it important that [private] schools are not test-whipped, specifically that they are not obsessed with basic reading and math bubble tests alone, or even more disturbing, tests of science and social studies content where the balance (or absence) of content is a function of partisan preferences of ill-informed politically motivated elected officials

states and the assessment consortia must move with all haste to deploy an assessment system that not only explicitly accommodates emerging models of innovative schooling, but also supports them

In a bold move, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), working on behalf of the Scottish Government, has been engaged over the past eighteen months in developing reading tasks based on moving image texts, for inclusion in the new-look Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy. The SSLN replaces the old  Scottish Survey of Achievement and assumes a much more significant role in the post 5-14 landscape. A small, random sample of pupils from EVERY school in the country in P4, P7 and S2 will be assigned a series of short tasks, the results of which should provide a snapshot of literacy levels across the country. Crucially, however, the anonymous nature of the survey and the size of the sample (no more than twelve pupils per school in S2 and much fewer in primary) will make it impossible to compare schools or compile the much-vilified ‘league tables’ of old. The tasks will assess performance in literacy using a wide variety of texts, including moving image texts, as defined by Curriculum for Excellence:-

texts not only include those presented in traditional written or print form, but also orally, electronically or on film

my test scores are not exemplary work. If I have done anything worthy of my students and school, I have accomplished it in the loud and quiet moments of connection between teaching, learning, and people in my classroom. I have pursued it by listening. I have apprehended it by letting go. I have felt it in helping some students outrace their circumstances into futures of their own making.

Within public education, I am at a disadvantage to those with higher pass rates and more dramatic gains because do not to measure the accomplishments that I consider to be exemplary. And that is the point of the system. We are different, we should be punished for it, we should remain silent, and we should do what we’re told. We must be made to understand. There are standards held by others against which we must be judged.

No one of any gender deserves to hear that message or to be coerced to live according to it, and that is why we must change what we do in our classrooms, schools, and society. It’s an individual decision to act, and we are free to make it and to accept and share the burden of consequences that come from it. We are capable defining, defending, and demonstrating our own successes so long as we strive to be excellent because excellence of all sorts is self-evident. If only the standard-bearers would bear some of that work, as well, we’d have a radically different school system strengthened by an embraced diversity of processes, products, and people.

It's safe to say that most K-12 schools are not naturally inclined to try new approaches without clear evidence that those approaches are likely to work. That cautious nature is not necessarily a bad thing because embracing change simply for the sake of change is misguided and will undoubtedly steer schools off a productive course.

But that raises an important question: How do schools innovate to improve themselves when innovation, by its very nature, usually happens before evidence of effectiveness is available?

people like [Indiana State Superintendent Tony] Bennett, who promote test-based “accountability” and other punitive reform strategies, are actually advocating for the status quo, since that is and has been the existing state of affairs for quite some time.

By contrast, we who embrace ideas like equitable funding and local control of curriculum are pursuing a state of affairs which, in many places, hasn’t existed for years (if ever!).

Read Seymour Papert’s list of 8 Big Ideas for Constructionist Learning and ask yourself seriously how much of that goes on in your school. My guess is not much, and the primary reason is we don’t value that stuff more than we value making sure kids pass the test. We don’t give kids time to go deep, we don’t honor failure, and we’re not about “learning to learn” as much as we are about “learning to know.” So many of our kids are disengaged or simply not interested in learning because they see no benefits past the exam. Are we really surprised that so many adults in our society aren’t learners? ...

Similarly, is anyone surprised that a huge swath of our population can’t speak intelligently about the larger issues that face us?

Nearly a decade of America’s test-based accountability systems, from “adequate yearly progress” to high school exit exams, have shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and education and have not included enough safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report

The [New York City] schools system is planning to use up to one-quarter of its $256 million share of the federal grant money for as many as 16 new standardized exams to cover science, math, social studies and English in the 3rd through 12th grades.

City officials want their tests to be different from the mostly multiple choice tests the state uses. A proposal given to testing companies for bids in April asks that the exams be based around tasks, like asking students to progress through a multistep math problem, modify a science experiment to get a different result, or write a persuasive essay. They should also reflect the more rigorous Common Core academic standards that New York and other states have adopted.

“How do you create an additional assessment that is actually going to strengthen instructional practice, rather than divert time away from instruction?” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer. “That is what we set out to solve.”

That still leaves the problem of credit. Public libraries were the original OER [open educational resource], yet people can't demand a diploma just because they've learned from a book. But here, too, new developments are under way. The latest and most sophisticated open educational resources have tests embedded within them because assessment is a fundamental element of learning. Feedback-based, assessment-driven "cognitive tutors" developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon are woven into science, engineering, and philosophy courses produced by the university's Open Learning Initiative. For example, studies have shown that their online statistics course produces equal or better learning results than do traditional lectures. The same Carnegie Mellon experts will be helping the federal-grant recipients design their educational tools. Assessments create evidence. And that's all a credit is, in the end: credible evidence of learning.

I recall once, for example, a Reading test asking fourth-graders about a passage they'd read about the human tongue and taste buds. One question asked the kids four distinct things (their favorite food, its flavor, where on the tongue that flavor was found, and how the taste buds work), with the original scoring rubric (established by classroom teachers) instructing the scorers to dole out one point for each of the four elements listed above. The teachers writing the rubric imagined straightforward answers like "my favorite food is popcorn, which is salty" (two points!) and "I like apples, a sweet taste found on the front of the tongue" (three points!), a scoring system that worked fine at least until theory turned into practice. Once it did -- once those intransigent schoolchildren started swamping us with all their unusual and unexpected answers -- then the scoring philosophy of those schoolteachers had to be laid to rest and the genius of the testing industry could be brought to bear.

The kids, you see, weren't just saying they liked to eat "apples" or that apples were "sweet." The kids were saying their favorite foods were "grass" and "water" and "Styrofoam," too, and even when they were identifying normal foods like "pizza" as a favorite they were then saying it was "salty," "sour," "bitter," and "sweet" (a.k.a. the entire spectrum of four flavors the human tongue can recognize). Furthermore, the students would often list a favorite food with what seemed an incorrect flavor ("my favorite food is ice cream, which is salty"), and then they would say they tasted that flavor on the tip of their tongue, which is not where one would taste "salty" (the side of the tongue) but is where one would taste ice cream, assuming it was sweet. The first couple hours of this scoring project, in other words, were pretty much total bedlam, massive disagreements within the group of employees I was training about whether "toothpaste" or "ice cubes" could be counted as favorite foods ("no" to the former and "yes" the latter), or "bitter" could be counted as the flavor of pizza (originally "no," at least until we considered toppings such as anchovies and artichokes, so then "yes").

According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the PISA scores released this past Tuesday were "a massive wake-up call." The scores show American students holding relatively steady in the middle of the pack of the developed nations taking the international exam.

I can't figure out what to make of Duncan's response. Certainly he knows that the 15-year-old Americans taking this exam grew up in schools dominated by the high-stakes testing of No Child Left Behind. He must also know that the other main trend in education during these students' schooling was a great increase in charter schools and other forms of school choice. One might think, then, that the massive wake-up call he's experiencing would sound something like Will Rogers' wisdom: "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

Alas, that's not what Secretary Duncan's wake-up call is apparently telling him.

A more interesting alternative to outsourcing the production of exams is to crowdsource them. My wiki-based courses feature student-written exams:

I then give students a week to comb through their notes and their books to come up with passages for identification, short answer questions, and essay exams. The deal I always make is that if the students come up with an adequate number of smart questions, then I’ll draw the exam entirely (or close to it) from their questions, and will usually post it as a study guide a day or two in advance of the final.

What’s nice, and sometimes terrifying, about this approach is that the resulting questions usually do genuinely reflect the class’s work. That is, it quickly becomes clear what your students will be taking away from your class. Further, when the students collaborate in this way, they both have to do the reflective, synthesizing work of question-writing (which is better than cramming) and to come to an implicit agreement about what our course was about.

Ms. [Valerie] Shute and other stealth-assessment researchers have turned to video games, which let educators watch students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual worlds. How students react to new challenges and put evidence together—without the pressure of test proctors breathing down their necks—can reveal a lot about creative problem-solving skills that traditional testing cannot deliver.

If at the end of the year, if the 9-year-olds haven’t made their presidential portraits out of pasta or built their toilet-paper-tube robots, their teacher would not have met her goal and would be graded accordingly.

We need assessments that gauge students' understanding and require them to demonstrate what they know, not tests that allow students to rely solely on guessing and picking one among four canned answers.

If you want to talk about authentic accountability, then we have to start asking the kids if they like school. Then we have to care about their answer. And then we have to stop blaming them and reflecting on our own practices.

if the students fail to learn the material as shown by the usual measures, it is the students’ fault, except that the students think it’s the teacher’s fault.

When Rhee took over the D.C. schools in 2007, "8 percent of our eighth graders were on grade level, but all the adults in our schools were rated as exceeding expectations," Rhee recalled to NEWSWEEK. "How can all the adults think they are doing an excellent job but producing at an 8 percent success level? There's a wild disconnect there.

What's this look like in your school district?

the kids are feeling "gob-smacked" about the whole project. They are used to having their research papers outlined for them .... gather info about the topic, produce five pages, make sure to use "x" number of sources, be sure to include ... blah, blah, blah..... We've given them minimal direction for this. Many don't know what to do. They are simply not used to being asked what is important to them. It will be interesting to watch what they do - once they stop whining and begging for direction

Why wouldn't they feel 'gob-smacked?' We've socialized them to be fact regurgitators...