Writing Is My Jam

Leslie Hall

  • Blog
  • About Me
  • What I Do
  • Contact
  • Subscribe

Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

February 14, 2012 Leslie Hall Leave a Comment

This just in, from Frank Brockmann, Center Point empresario and fellow quality crusader:

President Barack Obama announced last week that 10 states will be exempt from the requirements of the highly-criticized No Child Left Behind legislation. In exchange, those states will have to agree to a series of reforms. But some experts say the law should be scrapped completely for models that don’t rely on standardized tests.

Interesting, because last night I was reading about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire California Learning Assessment System. CLAS was not the first–and surely will not be the last–testing program to be felled by public controversy. Among the many objections to CLAS were to the reading passages (two of Alice Walker’s stories were excised after complaints that “Am I Blue” promoted vegetarianism, and “Roselily”was anti-religion), to the writing prompts (which were considered invasive), and to the test questions themselves (too subjective and based in emotion, according to critics).

When I began my career in hand-scoring, CLAS was one of my first projects, so I did at one time have more than a passing familiarity with the tests and how students responded to them. In general, I liked the questions (what did I know? I hadn’t any content development experience at that point), although scoring did present a problem.

In some parts of the test, students were encouraged to take notes–which were called “marginalia”– and for some questions, were offered various options as to how to respond: they could draw a picture, for example. Anyone who’s ever been presented with a drawing by a small child understands the obstacle in scoring there:

You: Oh, what a lovely dinosaur.
Child: It’s not a dinosaur.
You: No?
Child: No.
[pause]
You: What is it, love?
Child: It’s a manatee.
You: Oh, yes, of course it is.

I see what the developers and supporters of CLAS were attempting to accomplish, and the goal is a laudable one: to lure students into engaging with authentic literature and then to welcome their genuine, individual responses to what they read. However, in retrospect, these goals might be more readily achieved at the classroom level, through both instruction and formative assessment (and by “formative assessment,” I really mean all those teacherly techniques for paying attention to one’s students, not the administration of a series of badly-written multiple-choice quizzes), than through a standardized testing program.

The point is really to define clearly one’s purpose, and then create the assessment that will best serve that purpose, as “the man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder,” in the immortal words of Thomas Carlyle.

Big wheel keeps on turning. We went from bubble-in to performance assessment, back to bubble-in, and now we’re talking about performance assessment as if it were the hot new thing, never before attempted.

Not that we shouldn’t move in that direction–I like that direction very much–but if we do, there should be a moment of planning and taking stock (For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?), a gathering of the elders for the harvest of wise counsel, before there is a marshaling of forces. What is our purpose? What will we gain, what will we lose, is the loss worth the gain? How do we prepare teachers for this role?

What do you think?

Blog alice walker, California, censorship, classroom assessments, controversy, formative assessment, nclb, standardized assessment, thomas carlyle

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Leslie Hall

Leslie Hall

Writer, editor, educator, mentor, consultant. English language arts educational assessment and curriculum expert. [About Me]

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter

Search

Email UpdatesWIMJ updates are irregularly scheduled. If you like this post, sign up. I'll write more.

Other Posts

From The Guide to Wrangling Freelancers: Help Freelancers Love Their Work

Follow Your Dream: How I Got Started in K-12 Test Development

From The Guide to Wrangling Freelancers: Sweet Talk the Talent by Showing Appreciation

Mark-up: Annotating Text for Item Writing

The Dunce Is Us: The Real Problem with the Common Core Standards

Go Deep: How to Avoid Writing Superficial Reading Comprehension and Literary Analysis Items

How Can We Test Better?

Saturday Round Up: Free Resources for Teachers

Tags

assessment Blog CCSS common core standards content development creativity curriculum discipline editing editors education education reform ELA ELA content development employment free online college classes fun high-stakes integrity intention item writing language mistakes multiple choice national novel writing month nclb on writing well opportunity poetry quality quality controls reading reading comprehension reading passages recommended reading rigor school segregation teaching test preparation test publishing test scores william faulkner writers writing writing conventions

Post History

File Under Fun Friday

For fun. Because it's Friday, and because when you're a writer, you need to wander sometimes. Always … [Read More...]

Occupational Hazards for Writers and Editors

That title of occupational hazards for writers and editors almost sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Courtesy of … [Read More...]

How to Accept Rejection

How to Accept Rejection

Got my first rejection of this round of submissions: from The View from Here. Boilerplate. It's not fun, but … [Read More...]

Words to Live By

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose -- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
-- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Our own lives are the instruments with which we experiment with the truth.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain

...it is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
-- Jerome K. Jerome

Latest Post

From The Guide to Wrangling Freelancers: Help Freelancers Love Their Work

September 11, 2014 By Leslie Hall Leave a Comment


screenshot
“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” In the immortal words of Aristotle. The question is does work have to make people miserable? (If you don’t know whether you hate your job, you can take this quiz to find out.) I propose that it doesn’t; we don’t all have to feel like drafthorses harnessed to pull wagons of concrete. Bearing in mind that drafthorses have no choice. We do.
[Read More…]

Copyright © 2018 · Daily Dish Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in