Hey everyone, Happy Sunday Afternoon.
I came upon this tweet by @Larryferlazzo "The Best Posts & Articles About the Atlanta Testing Scandal this morning, and it led me to a host of articles about this controversy that has been exposed recently.
Here's the skinny: Apparently the entire school district has been changing student's answers in order to boost their test scores to improve their stats, so they don't lose funding, or get taken over.Over a hundred and fifty people were involved, and its unknown as to exactly how long this has been going on, although they've gotten quite a few teachers to step forward and fess up.
Many newspapers, and some commenters have discussed the fact that these teachers are letting their students down, and are cheating them out of a good education by not letting them have a real picture of what they're able to do and what they don't yet understand...
and that's all well and good, but what stands out to me, as has been stated by several other bloggers, is the fact that we have set up a faulty system of evaluation. Even when students take tests on their own, there is little room for discovery of what students actually know or are able to do. The tests instead rest on knowing how to answer questions properly rather than testing whether a student has real comprehension. With the removal of the writing portion from testing, this problem is exasperated.
Point being: Yes, these people acted unprofessionally, and (potentially) dishonestly, if you consider standardized testing a valid presentation of human knowledge. However, firing and ostracizing the teachers will not fix the fundamental problems, a couple of which are,
1) talking through answers to questions is not cheating anywhere else in the world except in schools, and it makes no sense to judge knowledge in this way.
2) If there continues to be a financial incentive for better test scores, this will continue to be an issue.
Just more evidence that we need to change our methods of assessment in this country.
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