At Some Point, Silence Equals Complicity

Recently, a letter from a parent to the administration at his child's school regarding high stakes testing appeared in the Washington Post (see here).  This is part of a long-overdue national dialogue about high-stakes, standardized testing and the difference between education and schooling.  As Illinois schools are set to transition from the ISAT to the PARCC test, it is time to talk about eliminating these tests entirely.

Testing Gone Wild . . . Part 2

Just when you thought that our students couldn't be subjected to more tests, the State of Illinois decides to replace the ISAT (Illinois Standard Achievement Test) with PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).  PARCC consists of four separate tests during the school year (see here).  So, on top of all of the current testing (including DRA testing, Discovery testing and CRT testing), our students will have PARCC testing (educators are beginning to give the Army some stiff competition in the acronym department).  One might wonder, with all of this testing and only 180 days in the school year, exactly when are the teachers going to teach?  And are they merely going to be expected to teach to the tests?

Ostensibly, all of this testing is being done in order to gather "data" so that teachers can differentiate instruction for each student. But, teachers do this each and every day through observing their students in the classroom.

And what is going to happen to the students who do not perform well on standardized tests but who perform well on less formal evaluations?  I suspect that those students are going to suffer since the test scores will become the "end all and be all" of education (if they aren't already).