A place for tests

As much as people seem to deplore tests, they do have a place, says testing expert Doug McRae. They provide information on the "progress of our school systems in our current information age," McRae writes.

An interesting conversation has developed among McRae, Bardin Elementary teacher Daniel Delgado, and yours truly in the middle of it. McRae characterized the advance made by California in STAR test results as "pedestrian." Delgado objected. I posted Delgado's letter in my post. It's only fair I print McRae's response to it.

By Doug McRae

Several reactions:

(1) I would agree my analysis was only quantitative. It is hard to do a
qualitative analysis on achievement gains for the entire state of California
grades 2-11 involving 4.8 million kids, several hundred thousand teachers,
tens of thousands administrators. So, we revert to a quantitative analysis.
As you note, is is not correct to generalize from the whole to a single
part, such as achievement gains at Bardin Elem alone. I've have no quibble
with the teachers' description of gains at Bardin Elem, qualitative or
quantitative, though I haven't analyzed the Bardin information myself.

(2) I'd suggest you might give your readers access to my full analysis of
California STAR scores that led to a "C" grade [actually, "C-" with
adjustments] via a link on your blog site. If a link is problematic, then
refer your readers to TopED's post on 8/16 where my full analysis is linked,
and several other opinions are noted re the statewide 2 point increases on
STAR this year. (Claudia's note: here's McRae's analysis in my blog, and here's John Festernwald's analysis of McRae's data in TopEd)

(3) I find the teachers' criticism of educational publishing companies
rather unfair. First, I worked for the testing division of McGraw-Hill
(headquartered in Monterey), not the instructional materials divisions the
teacher references, and to protect the integrity of the tests the testing
division published which were used to evaluate the results generated by
instructional materials generated by other divisions of McGraw-Hill as well
as other publishing companies we maintained an arm's length relationship
with other division's of McGraw-Hill. Second, the rhetoric re the
instructional materials developed by publishers as being "poor resources"
and "huge cash cows" may be one individual's opinion but simply are not
factual.

(4) Finally, let me say a few words about your description of the complaints
regarding the role of testing in K-12 schools in this day and age. You do
accurately relate recent criticisms directed toward K-12 assessment systems,
particularly in political and media circles. You know, tests have never
been "popular" with kids -- I wasn't all that fond of taking tests when I
was a kid, and neither are most kids confronted with tests to show their
academic achievement, be they teacher made tests or larger scale tests. Now
that tests have assumed a role for evaluating the effectiveness of
professional educators in our K-12 system (even though it is mostly an
indirect role), large scale "high stakes" tests are not popular with
professional educators. But they do play a valuable role by providing
quantitative information on the progress of our school systems in our
current "information age." Along with critics of K-12 testing, I deplore
the unintended negative practices attributed to high stakes tests -- narrow
teaching to the test, drill and kill coaching to try to game test results,
undue focus on content areas tested at the expense of content areas not
tested. But, I point out these bad practices cannot be attributed to the
tests themselves -- there is nothing about a test itself that forces poor
instructional practice by the professionals in our K-12 schools. As has
been said by others -- no one suggests sports be eliminated because some
athletes cheat or because some fans spend unproductive time following their
favorite teams. The same can be said of tests -- blame poor instructional
decisions made in some places and by some professionals, not the test
itself. Don't blame the messenger when the news isn't what you want.

Doug McRae