The problem is that standardized testing doesn't tell you if students are being educated, it tells you if students are passing standardized tests, which is a different problem that, at best, only partially overlaps with the actual question. If you over-optimize for standardized testing, you end up under-optimizing for actual education.
I had to take the WASL as part of my graduation from high school, back in 2003. Forcing this requirement on schools did not improve our education, it degraded it. Instead of actually reading two or three good books in our english class, we studied cliff notes of 15 or so works, so we could write shallow summaries of "key themes" for the test, for whichever books actually appeared on it. Instead of going forward with trigonometry in math, we went over estimation and hammered on very basic geometry problems. My government class stopped covering its subject matter entirely, and we studied analogies and reading comprehension, because government wasn't on the WASL (at the time; it might be now). The net effect was that as a class we did really well on that test, but our actual education suffered. That's what standardized testing gets you.
I program for a living, but I've not taken any programming tests since I was in school. How do people know that I'm doing a good job without my taking a standardized test?
The answer is one we've had for a long time - talk with the teachers. Teachers are professionals, paid to educated children and evaluate what needs to be improved. We developed normal schools to train people how to be teachers. These became known as teachers' colleges, and then became education programs in a university.
In addition to continuing education programs and peer development, we also have oversight programs in place, including the department head, principal, and local school board. Among other things, these are supposed to help identify teaching problems and remedy them.
Unfortunately, management is both support and punishment, which can lead to power imbalance where a school board member says "My nephew must be on the football team or else you won't get a raise next year!" One way to limit this power imbalance is to set up a teacher union or tenure system. Another is for additional community oversight, which may include the parent-teacher organizations like the PTA.
Therefore, your question sounds like you trust the authors of standardized tests (who are often in for-profit companies that sell the tests, sell standards, and sell text books which match the standards) more than you trust teachers or the professional education system.
There are a couple of other branches in this thread waiting for your followup for the last few hours, and you pick this one? I still want to know if you think that "proficiency in the subject matter" is defined as "ability to pass a standardized test."
You think neither I nor the entire education system over the last 150 years have ever considered the effect of the principal agent problem? I even said "we also have oversight programs in place, including the department head, principal, and local school board." I elsewhere also pointed out to you how test manufacturers stand to make a profit if they can convince people to buy their tests, curriculum, and text books. They most certainly have a bias.
Your comparison to unit tests is telling, in ways you didn't mean it to be. Every project I've worked on has a very different set of unit tests, with essentially nothing shared between the different test cases outside some common test infrastructure.
Even multiple people on the same project end up writing different sorts of unit tests for the same code base. I do more functional and coverage driven tests, a co-worker is a red-green-refactor TDD developer. This diversity of tests is probably better for the overall code base than if we all did the same thing.
You do realize that teachers almost certainly have studied assessment design as part of their coursework, while most developers have almost no formal training in test engineering or experience in, say, coverage analysis?
If the goal is to test the students, then the teacher can - like the developer with good test engineering skills - develop the appropriate tests for the given set of students and expected knowledge. Except the teacher's tests must also be engaging and authentic, while the computer doesn't care what it runs.
And yet you think that one single set of unit tests for, say, all 8th grade English teachers can be useful enough to judge a specific student's progress, or a specific teacher's skills? Where does that optimism of yours come from?
Honestly, I have no idea if you're doing a good job. At least (as far as I know) you're not asking for federal funding for your job.
Well, I don't have to trust the authors since I can see and evaluate the test for myself. I can't really evaluate every teacher and analyze the pressures on them.
Education is primarily state funded, not federal. I believe federal funding is only 10% of the local school budget, and includes meal assistance and other things which aren't directly tied to a teaching position.
In any case, your original question is also valid for private schools - how do the parents of private school students know if their children are being educated or if the schools need help? How does the bishop overseeing several Catholic schools do the same?
Therefore, why is "federal funding" relevant to the topic?
As I understand it, you don't have access to the questions and answers for the high stakes tests, so you can't evaluate them. I can be proven wrong. Can you show me the complete set of questions for a state test from last spring? I looked for Florida, and only found FCAT tests from 2005/2006 at http://fcat.fldoe.org/fcatrelease.asp . I could not find FCAT 2 questions from 2013 or 2014, though I did find the scores from http://fcat.fldoe.org/fcat2/ .
This is what I expected, because some of the questions are potential questions for future tests, and exist to calibrate the tests. If the questions and answers are published, then they can't be used that way.
Which suggests that you don't know what you're talking about, as regards high stakes testing, or that there are some states where all of the tests are published, so that people like you can review them. Which tests are you thinking of?
If I understand you correctly, you are satisfied if you can "see and evaluate the test." Wouldn't you be similarly satisfied if you could "see and evaluate" all of the tests from each teacher at every school? Since that seems a lot cheaper and easier to do than set up high-stakes testing across the country.
You're right about most of the funding but NCLB has provisions to redistribute federal money to specific schools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act#Fundi... And while you don't get specific questions, you can see example tests to see what subjects are covered, how much is multiple choice vs essay, etc.
Yes, the feds contribute some of the money in exchange for a lot of the rules. That doesn't change anything of what I said - your original question is independent of federal involvement and could equally apply to privately owned Catholic schools.
Have you changed your viewpoint? You previously said "I don't have to trust the authors since I can see and evaluate the test for myself." Now you're okay with seeing only a synopsis of what's in the tests? Why do you still trust the authors if you can't see the actual test?
If you could get the same synopsis of the questions that the teachers ask, then wouldn't you also be satisfied? Why not?
I'm actually kind of disappointed that there's not more information available. It still seems better than what we got before, which was even less informative. And it would be niceto have that synopsis, but it's much more useful to have a standard so we can compare across schools.
> your question sounds like you trust the authors of standardized tests (who are often in for-profit companies that sell the tests, sell standards, and sell text books which match the standards) more than you trust teachers or the professional education system.
> Why is that, do you think?
You answered that it's because you could see the test questions, and evaluate them for yourself. Then you said it's because you could see samples of the questions. Now you say it's because you can compare scores?
Curriculum standards have been around since the 1800s, so is "have a standard" short for "have standardized tests"? Actually, we've had those for decades - my birth state of Florida started them in the 1970s, so I assume you mean "have high stakes standardized tests"? Actually, Florida also introduced the nation's first required high school graduation test in 1977", so you must mean "frequent high stakes standardized tests", yes?
How is this more useful than earlier assessment tests, as well as GPA, SAT scores, ACT scores, graduation percentages, number of students going on to the Ivy League/Big 10/whatever, number of National Merit (semi)finalists, number of available AP/IB courses, average AP score results for a given field, lists of extracurricular activities, football team scores, and a lot of other cross-school comparison metrics?
Again I ask, what is the basis of your trust of the authors of a standardized test over the teachers and the professional education system?
I had to take the WASL as part of my graduation from high school, back in 2003. Forcing this requirement on schools did not improve our education, it degraded it. Instead of actually reading two or three good books in our english class, we studied cliff notes of 15 or so works, so we could write shallow summaries of "key themes" for the test, for whichever books actually appeared on it. Instead of going forward with trigonometry in math, we went over estimation and hammered on very basic geometry problems. My government class stopped covering its subject matter entirely, and we studied analogies and reading comprehension, because government wasn't on the WASL (at the time; it might be now). The net effect was that as a class we did really well on that test, but our actual education suffered. That's what standardized testing gets you.