High standards and
accountability are critical to school reform, and I strongly support both these
areas.
I do worry that using test
scores as the sole measure of progress can mask the more complete picture.
Here’s a quiz we often use to illustrate the point:
Which of the following factors
is the most accurate predictor of a school’s standardized test scores?
A. The quality of the teaching
staff
B. The percentage of students
receiving free or reduced lunches
C. The number of children who
moved from another school during the year
D. The average number of hours
volunteered each week
E. The number of mothers who
hold a college degree.
The answer is E.
Nationwide, schools with the
highest number of mothers with college degrees have the highest test scores. No
other factor correlates as highly.
But the answer is also ‘all of
the above,’ because ALL these factors correlate with test scores.
Everyone agrees we must have a
means to evaluate how well a student has grasped the subject matter that’s been
taught, and good tests do just that.
But sometimes it is hard for
students to show on a test what they really know quite well. The problem is
dealing with the way a question is asked, not the information itself.
We need to know which students
are truly falling short in knowledge so that we can help them succeed. The
correlating factors remind us that when it comes to achievement, test scores
can never tell us the whole story.
