Smoke and mirrors and standardized testing by another name
I have some big questions for those who still believe our current model of educational accountability has any real value:
Compliance ≠ effectiveness. But in educational accountability, policy makers insist we pretend it does.
Now, about testing—because we can’t ignore it. Standardized tests, like those used in every state accountability system, were never designed to give a single, definitive judgment about students or even populations of students. They model what literacy or numeracy looks like across a population allowing causes to be studied. What they don’t, and cannot do, is tell us how much of that trait any student possesses.
Think about that. Standardized testing simply scales traits along a continuum, which allows researchers to study things you can’t measure directly: humor, grit, schizophrenia—and yes, literacy and numeracy.
Any claim that a test score tells us how much literacy or numeracy a student has is an invention, it’s meaning grafted onto a score that was never designed to answer the question.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Educational measurement has a set of rigorous standards that the industry has adopted and uses, and they say as much.
So yes, standardized testing is an issue. But the deeper issue is still the system that misuses tests in a way outside their design and calls it accountability.
Which brings me to why I’m writing this. Texans are celebrating the end of STAAR testing as a political win, a supposed step forward. The replacement is “through-year testing,” marketed as something better because it happens multiple times a year, closer to when student learn.
But it’s smoke and mirrors. The language in the bills that make the change legal are explicit in requiring the same testing methodology we’ve always used and places het scores right back into a compliance-based accountability model. New name, same bad assumptions about standardized testing, and the same flawed model. The unpopular STAAR brand disappears, only to be replaced by another version of the very model people think they are rejecting, done three times a year.
And so, we arrive at another lousy crossroads. Enormous political capital is being spent on what amounts to a cosmetic shift, while the root problem—the failed accountability model—goes untouched. The assumption seems to be that STAAR itself contained the entirety of the problem when that has never been the case.
Nothing meaningful will change as a result of this shift to whatever the new testing program will be called, not because educators and communities don’t want it to, but because once again, we’re focused on the wrong thing.
- Why is education the only field where policymakers pretend compliance equals effectiveness? That’s like saying, “all teachers passed a criminal background check, so they must be great teachers.”
- Why is education the only field where we judge an entire organization based on an important but narrow slice of what happens inside it? Accountability is supposed to be to all the things that matter, as that is the precursor to trust.
- Why is education the only field where “accountability” is entirely top down, treating the local context as irrelevant?
- And why is education the only field where the organizations in wealthy neighborhoods are all but guaranteed to get mostly good marks, while the organizations in poor neighborhoods and all but guaranteed to get bad ones, and we act like that’s okay? In any other profession such a system would be tossed out and those supporting it fired for promoting a message that cannot possibly be telling the whole truth.
Compliance ≠ effectiveness. But in educational accountability, policy makers insist we pretend it does.
Now, about testing—because we can’t ignore it. Standardized tests, like those used in every state accountability system, were never designed to give a single, definitive judgment about students or even populations of students. They model what literacy or numeracy looks like across a population allowing causes to be studied. What they don’t, and cannot do, is tell us how much of that trait any student possesses.
Think about that. Standardized testing simply scales traits along a continuum, which allows researchers to study things you can’t measure directly: humor, grit, schizophrenia—and yes, literacy and numeracy.
Any claim that a test score tells us how much literacy or numeracy a student has is an invention, it’s meaning grafted onto a score that was never designed to answer the question.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Educational measurement has a set of rigorous standards that the industry has adopted and uses, and they say as much.
So yes, standardized testing is an issue. But the deeper issue is still the system that misuses tests in a way outside their design and calls it accountability.
Which brings me to why I’m writing this. Texans are celebrating the end of STAAR testing as a political win, a supposed step forward. The replacement is “through-year testing,” marketed as something better because it happens multiple times a year, closer to when student learn.
But it’s smoke and mirrors. The language in the bills that make the change legal are explicit in requiring the same testing methodology we’ve always used and places het scores right back into a compliance-based accountability model. New name, same bad assumptions about standardized testing, and the same flawed model. The unpopular STAAR brand disappears, only to be replaced by another version of the very model people think they are rejecting, done three times a year.
And so, we arrive at another lousy crossroads. Enormous political capital is being spent on what amounts to a cosmetic shift, while the root problem—the failed accountability model—goes untouched. The assumption seems to be that STAAR itself contained the entirety of the problem when that has never been the case.
Nothing meaningful will change as a result of this shift to whatever the new testing program will be called, not because educators and communities don’t want it to, but because once again, we’re focused on the wrong thing.
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