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I find myself unmoved by the argument "if you have standarized tests we won't have time to teach anything but what's on the tests". http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

by MaggieL 14y ago

I find myself unmoved by the argument "if you have standarized tests we won't have time to teach anything but what's on the tests". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

bwhite 14y ago
I assume the NCLB standardized tests cover things which are widely considered to be core reading and math skills. PBS has a number of sample questions here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_child/test.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_ch.... The topics seem pretty core to me. If teachers broadly find themselves having to devote significant additional time to these subjects in order to pass the tests, what does that say about pre-NCLB curricula? Learning to take a test is a skill which would not necessarily be taught in the pre-NCLB world, but how much time does that really take? Are there any real studies of this? It seems to me that a child with a decent grasp of the subjects appearing on that test would not require an inordinate amount of instruction in test taking.
bdunbar 14y ago
It's all about the funding. Standardized tests are not new. I took them in the 70s and early 80s: a few days of sitting in home room, filling out circles with a number two pencil. Big deal: they had no affect on my actual grade. What they were was a benchmark for the school. As I understand it, what _is_ new is the pressure on the schools to produce kids who can pass the test. Since there is now a great deal on the line for the district ( funding ), a lot more time is devoted to producing students who can pass the tests. This is only natural, and was easily seen as a consequence of no child left behind.
- jessaustin 14y ago
  My experience in the late 80s and early 90s matches your own, except I got the impression that poor teachers did teach to the test extensively. I didn't get that impression from good teachers; they just seemed like good teachers. Looking back, I hypothesize that merely competent school administrators used standardized tests to identify problems, while smart administrators identified problems with the tests but then didn't actually cite the tests when dealing with those problems. Because after you've put a few losers on performance plans and blamed their test results when they asked why, the other losers in your school might catch on. (This seems to imply that administrators at schools I attended were merely competent, which implication I cannot contradict.) If such a dynamic did exist, one could predict it would take hold on a national level with the advent of NCLB. Then one would expect that NCLB had the effect primarily of making standardized tests less accurate...

by MaggieL 14y ago

bwhite 14y ago

I assume the NCLB standardized tests cover things which are widely considered to be core reading and math skills. PBS has a number of sample questions here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_child/test.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_ch.... The topics seem pretty core to me. If teachers broadly find themselves having to devote significant additional time to these subjects in order to pass the tests, what does that say about pre-NCLB curricula? Learning to take a test is a skill which would not necessarily be taught in the pre-NCLB world, but how much time does that really take? Are there any real studies of this? It seems to me that a child with a decent grasp of the subjects appearing on that test would not require an inordinate amount of instruction in test taking.

bdunbar 14y ago

It's all about the funding. Standardized tests are not new. I took them in the 70s and early 80s: a few days of sitting in home room, filling out circles with a number two pencil. Big deal: they had no affect on my actual grade. What they were was a benchmark for the school. As I understand it, what _is_ new is the pressure on the schools to produce kids who can pass the test. Since there is now a great deal on the line for the district ( funding ), a lot more time is devoted to producing students who can pass the tests. This is only natural, and was easily seen as a consequence of no child left behind.

jessaustin 14y ago
My experience in the late 80s and early 90s matches your own, except I got the impression that poor teachers did teach to the test extensively. I didn't get that impression from good teachers; they just seemed like good teachers. Looking back, I hypothesize that merely competent school administrators used standardized tests to identify problems, while smart administrators identified problems with the tests but then didn't actually cite the tests when dealing with those problems. Because after you've put a few losers on performance plans and blamed their test results when they asked why, the other losers in your school might catch on. (This seems to imply that administrators at schools I attended were merely competent, which implication I cannot contradict.) If such a dynamic did exist, one could predict it would take hold on a national level with the advent of NCLB. Then one would expect that NCLB had the effect primarily of making standardized tests less accurate...