Teaching to the test: A very large red herring

• Main Author: Richard P. Phelps
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nonpartisan Education Group 2016-05-01
• Series: Nonpartisan Education Review
• Subjects: Lake Wobegon Effect; educator cheating; cheating on tests; test security; test-score inflation; education policy; standardized testing
• Online Access: http://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v12n1.htm
• ISSN: 2150-6477; 2150-6477

Elevating teaching-to-the-test to dogma, from the beginning with the distortion of Dr. Cannell’s findings, has served to divert attention from scandals that should have threatened US educators’ almost complete control of their own evaluation.[10] Had the scandal Dr. Cannell uncovered been portrayed honestly to the public—educators cheat on tests administered internally with lax security—the obvious solution would have been to externally manage all assessments (Oliphant, 2011). Recent test cheating scandals in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and elsewhere once again drew attention to a serious problem. But, instead of blaming lax security and internally managed test administration, most educators blamed the stakes and alleged undue pressure that ensues (Phelps 2011a). Their recommendation, as usual: drop the stakes and reduce the amount of testing. Never mind the ironies: they want oversight lifted so they may operate with none, and they admit that they cannot be trusted to administer tests to our children properly, but we should trust them to educate our children properly if we leave them alone. Perhaps the most profound factoids revealed by the more recent scandals were, first, that the cheating had continued for ten years in Atlanta before any responsible person attempted to stop it and, even then, it required authorities outside the education industry to report the situation honestly. Second, in both Atlanta and Washington, DC, education industry test security consultants repeatedly declared the systems free of wrongdoing (Phelps 2011b). Meanwhile, thirty years after J. J. Cannell first showed us how lax security leads to corrupted test scores, regardless the stakes, test security remains cavalierly loose. We have teachers administering state tests in their own classrooms to their own students, principals distributing and collecting test forms in their own schools. Security may be high outside the schoolhouse door, but inside, too much is left to chance. And, as it turns out, educators are as human as the rest of us; some of them cheat and not all of them manage to keep test materials secure, even when they aren’t intentionally cheating. - See more at: http://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v12n1.htm