SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline 4384

One of the things that you learn early on when you work as a teacher is that you get what you test for. (This is a special case of the rule that you get what you reward.) Do we really want high school graduates with a mbutt of comparatively useless trivia, experienced and adept at Scantron tests?

Testing and evaluation are *hard*. Legislators want simple, objective answers, and there really aren't any to be had; so instead of doing the best they can with subjective evaluation, they subsbreastute a completely useless objective evaluation, and then make it so important that the teachers can't work around it.

There are certainly lazy teachers, but in this case they're allied with the much larger group of teachers who object to the current tests because they aren't testing anything useful, and because the sort of "performance" they'd need to do isn't good.

One analogy would be a manager who measures your performance *solely* on the number of lines of code you produce. Nothing else matters: meeting the business requirements is irrelevant; fixing or avoiding bugs is irrelevant; avoiding messes is irrelevant. Unless you produce 1000 lines of code a week, you're fired, and your chances of promotion ridiculous; it's not the way to produce software. Now imagine that if you complain about that, you're labeled as a lazy programmer who doesn't want to be held to account. The metric is ridiculous, as anyone who knows the slightest bit about the field can tell, but it looks good to the bean counters, and it's easy enough to measure -- and if you demonize anyone who speaks up to point out what a bad metric it is, you can look like you're Doing Something About The Problem.

I recall the lament of a friend who worked in the English department of a vocational high school. He and his coworkers did an excellent job -- students came in reading and writing at a second or third grade level (for non-US people: that's about what you'd expect at age 7-8) and left four years later reading at 9th or 10th grade level (age 15-16). Professional educators considered this remarkable: they were taking students that the regular school system had failed, and making 8 years of progress in 4 years. The state government bureaucracy considered them an underperforming school because they were graduating 12th graders who were reading at 10th grade level.

Charlton