Reblogged from Dog with a Bone
If you don’t count undeserving people in high places or a burgeoning education reform industry of paid tweeters, bloggers and think tank thinkers, high stakes testing, known ironically as accountability, is currently among the most unaccountable of unaccountable things in American education today. It is unaccountable in the very thing that it purports to account for: the measurement and evaluation of learning, teachers and schools. It does none of these things well.
The most obvious reason for this is that staked testing shifts the priority from what will help a child to what will help the adults that teach her. High stakes advocates will argue that a high stake is the best way to insure that adult and child concerns are identical. But, in practice, this turns out to be untrue. A high stake explicitly reduces the child to evidence of adult performance. Students aren’t first; scores are first.