Chapter Three: STANDARDIZING testing and cognitive skills
Defining Proficiency
- Tests can't judge creativity, insight, reasoning, and application of knowledge to unrehearsed situations, NCLB is therefore harmful, since it only judges standardized basics.
- Every grade and sub-group must make progress toward 2014 goal or penalties kick in.
- Benchmarking/norm-referencing is the way schools (and businesses...) see strides in proficiency.
- Proficiency is a SUBJECTIVE judgment. NAEP judgments say that only about a third of students are proficient in reading and math.
- States can therefore fudge their definitions of proficiency by making their own numbers
- Good thing about NCLB: instruction becomes aimed at students below proficiency point, minorities and low income
- Good teaching requires lower and higher skills to be taught in conjunction
- Students have good and bad days, tests can be inaccurate. Much depends on the culture of each individual class.
- Distractions could hurt test taking.
- Problems can't be fixed if we depend on a system that passes or fails simply on data reports.