[Phys-L] Re: Ambiguous Question

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

A big IF.  High stakes testing has only one purpose.  It is designed to
punish the workers to make them work harder.  That strategy has never been
successful.  You can't just increase the speed of the assembly line and
punish the workers when they can't handle it.  This exactly what is
happening in education.  The requirements are increasing without any regard
to what can be done, and the workers are not being trained to work better.

As a result the quality of education is actually going down because the
students in many schools only get to read teat review booklets rather than
books.  And this is happening more in the lower schools.  The prestigious
schools laugh at the tests and continue to do education.  Of course the
upper schools only have that position because they have high scoring
incoming students.  Mostly they do little different from what the lower
schools are doing.

Shayer and Adey showed that if you plot output scores vs intake scores all
schools in England fall on the same line.  Great Britain tried high stakes
testing, and it created a teacher shortage with no significant progress.
Why do we have to repeat a failed experiment?  Shayer & Adey also created
"Thinking Science" which moves schools up compared to their cohorts.  TS
improves student thinking.  But to achieve this teachers had to be carefully
trained to use the materials.  This involved long term inservices over 2
years and school monitoring.  Also it involved commitment by the school and
all science teachers to use the materials in a coordinated fashion.

High stakes testing is not getting schools to do this.  Instead principals
are mandating review workbooks and really stupid scripted lessons.  In
addition they cheat.  The thinking skills of students are decreasing as a
result.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> If we value high stakes testing and want it
> to
> be improved, work on State Departments of Education to use the model used
> in
> a few states and get them to use the resources in their state classrooms
> to
> develop quality testing programs internally.
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