Yet one more doomed attempt to link standardized testing and instruction
The recent acquisition by HMH of NWEA seems to have been driven by a phenomenally flawed logic: that normative (i.e., standardized, predictive) testing can be tied to instruction. This error that apparently seems so rational on the surface is so fraught with absurdities that it’s hard to imagine—perhaps think of using a fish as a hammer on a ship since they both occupy a spot in the ocean. I wish I were exaggerating, but I can’t think of anything more absurd at the moment—it's the wrong tool for the job by as far as the eye can see. Standardized testing is a highly technical research methodology that sorts students onto a scale for the purpose of analyzing the relative differences between them. That’s a mouthful. Think of it like this: pretend you wanted to analyze height, but the measuring tape hadn’t yet been invented yet. You could still do an analysis by lining everyone up from the shortest to the tallest. From there you can find the average, identify how many steps above or be...