Leonie Haimson, a New York City public school parent, is the executive director of Class Size Matters, a citywide advocacy group. This post first appeared in The New York Times here.
by Leonie Haimson
Campbell's Law predicts that any time huge stakes are attached to quantitative data, the data itself will become inherently unreliable and distorted through cheating and gaming the system. In the New York City public schools, the overemphasis on standardized testing has led to test score inflation and numerous cheating scandals. Precious resources are diverted to for-profit testing companies, and learning time is lost as students spend weeks preparing for the tests, and teachers are pulled out of the classroom for days at a time to score them. Meanwhile school budgets are scraped to the bone and class sizes are rising. In New York City, class sizes in the early grades are the largest in 13 years.
The new federal mandate that teachers be judged at least in part on how well student test scores have risen is exacerbating this trend. Schools with the greatest numbers of poor, immigrant and special needs children will be increasingly subject to slash and burn tactics: mass closures and/or firings of educators, making it even more unlikely that qualified, experienced teachers will be drawn to working with the most at-risk students in the future.
What would be a better way of evaluating teachers and schools? One cannot take human judgment out of the equation. Student learning should be assessed by multiple measures, including portfolios of class work. Teachers and schools should be evaluated based on the results of those evaluations as well as through peer review and parent and student surveys.The National Academy of Sciences has not once but twice spoken out against imposing this sort of high stakes accountability scheme on our schools, and pointed out the dangers of basing irreversible decisions on erratic and inherently unreliable test scores filtered through imperfect and abstruse formulae.
Schools should also be rated on whether they provide the conditions for a quality education: small classes, a well-rounded curriculum and experienced teachers who are treated as professionals rather than cogs in a machine. Never again should we forget that learning takes place through human interaction, inspiration, creative thought and individual effort. Piling on more standardized testing undermines the conditions that will make this possible.
by Leonie Haimson
Campbell's Law predicts that any time huge stakes are attached to quantitative data, the data itself will become inherently unreliable and distorted through cheating and gaming the system. In the New York City public schools, the overemphasis on standardized testing has led to test score inflation and numerous cheating scandals. Precious resources are diverted to for-profit testing companies, and learning time is lost as students spend weeks preparing for the tests, and teachers are pulled out of the classroom for days at a time to score them. Meanwhile school budgets are scraped to the bone and class sizes are rising. In New York City, class sizes in the early grades are the largest in 13 years.
The new federal mandate that teachers be judged at least in part on how well student test scores have risen is exacerbating this trend. Schools with the greatest numbers of poor, immigrant and special needs children will be increasingly subject to slash and burn tactics: mass closures and/or firings of educators, making it even more unlikely that qualified, experienced teachers will be drawn to working with the most at-risk students in the future.
What would be a better way of evaluating teachers and schools? One cannot take human judgment out of the equation. Student learning should be assessed by multiple measures, including portfolios of class work. Teachers and schools should be evaluated based on the results of those evaluations as well as through peer review and parent and student surveys.The National Academy of Sciences has not once but twice spoken out against imposing this sort of high stakes accountability scheme on our schools, and pointed out the dangers of basing irreversible decisions on erratic and inherently unreliable test scores filtered through imperfect and abstruse formulae.
Schools should also be rated on whether they provide the conditions for a quality education: small classes, a well-rounded curriculum and experienced teachers who are treated as professionals rather than cogs in a machine. Never again should we forget that learning takes place through human interaction, inspiration, creative thought and individual effort. Piling on more standardized testing undermines the conditions that will make this possible.
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