High Stakes Testing Is the Term Paper

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Recognition of quality and lack there of should be a basic goal of the education system, as it strives to direct resources and change situations that are not meeting the demands of accountability, yet it is clear that High Stakes testing does a poor job identifying good schools and good teachers as it ignored, by default important information that is not available on the test scores. It has been clear for countless years that socioeconomics, for example plays a much larger role in most high stakes test scores than the ability of the teacher, as it does in many other issues surrounding student performance and even long-term lifetime outcomes. Excellent teachers in poorer school districts will be misidentified as substandard due to factors beyond their control, and students will be held back based on circumstances outside of their control, if a single form of assessment is to be the rule.

The majority of students who failed the MCAS examinations were from school districts serving low social class and poor or working class families. The report supports one of the most fundamental arguments against high-stakes testing -- scores on high-stakes tests are only a measure of students' socioeconomic status (Clancy 2000; Kohn 2001; Sacks 1999; Wilgoren 2000; Zwick 2002). It seems that students' performances on high-stakes tests have "almost everything to do with parental socioeconomic backgrounds, and less to do with teachers, curricula, or what the children learned in the classroom" (Clancy 2000, A19). These tests merely perpetuate and reinforce inequalities in public education Kozol (1991) described over a decade ago. (Volger, 2004)

Yet, despite this clear indication that the tests are not testing what their implementers intend them to test has not seemed to create enough of a conflict to demand the return of multiple resource assessment, and schools and systems continue to validate the high stakes testing system without choice.

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In conclusion, the validity of single aspect assessment is clearly in question, from the top of the chain of command to the youngest student struggling with test material and lecture-based curriculum, devoid of creativity. Several problems exist with using high stakes testing as a single weighty assessment tool; high stakes testing is intimidating to new and seasoned teachers, high stakes testing can create inherant narrowing of curriculum, teachers feel pressured to cover test material rather than curriculum, lecture style teaching dominates when test preparation is the only feasible goal and lastly high stakes testing ignores important demographic, the greatest of which is socioeconomic status which can skew understandings gained from test scores and erroneously narrow perceptions of quality of teacher, student and system.

Resources

Costigan, Arthur T. (Winter 2002). Teaching the Culture of High Stakes Testing: Listening to New Teachers. Action in Teacher Education, v. 23 no4, 28-34. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from First Search: WilsonSelectPlus.

Edwords, Fred. (May/June 2005). The Issue at Hand. The Humanist, v. 65 no3, 3. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from First Search: WilsonSelectPlus.

Johnson, Dale D., & Johnson, Bonnie. (2006). High Stakes: Poverty, Testing, and Failure in American Schools (2nd ed). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Jones, Brett D. & Egley, Robert J. (June 2006). Looking Through Different Lenses: Teachers' and Administrators' Views of Accountability. Phi Delta Kappan, v. 87 no10, 767-71. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from First Search: WilsonSelectPlus.

Lederman, Leon M. & Burnstein, Ray a. (Feb. 2006). Alternative Approaches to High-Stakes Testing. Phi Delta Kappan, v. 87 no6, 429-32. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from First Search: WilsonSelectPlus.

McGill-Franzen, Anne. (June 2006). Contamination of Current Accountability Systems. Phi Delta Kappan, v. 87 no10, 762-6. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from First Search: WilsonSelectPlus.

Neill, Monty. (March/April 2006). The Case Against High-Stakes Testing. Principal, v. 85 no4, 28-32......

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