They Serve? TESTS
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National Academy of Education (Shepard, 1993).
These critiques point out that the methods for
constructing the levels are flawed, that the levels
demand unreasonably high performance, and that
they yield results that are not corroborated by other
measures.
In spite of the criticisms, the U.S. Department of
Education permitted the flawed levels to be used
until something better was developed. Unfortunately, no one has ever worked on developing
anything better—perhaps because the apparently
low student performance indicated by the small
percentage of test-takers reaching Proficient has
proven too politically useful to school critics.
For instance, education reformers and politicians
have lamented that only about one-third of 8th
graders read at the Proficient level. On the surface,
this does seem awful. Yet, if students in other
nations took the NAEP, only about one-third of
them would also score Proficient—even in the
nations scoring highest on international reading
comparisons (Rothstein, Jacobsen, & Wilder,
2006).
Additional characteristics of the NAEP make it a
poor accountability tool. First, because any given
student would need hours to complete the whole
test, no student ever takes the entire test, nor does
any school have all its students participate. Neither
districts, nor schools, nor individual students find
out how they performed (although NAEP has
conducted “trial” assessments in 11 large urban
districts to explore the feasibility of reporting NAEP
data at the district level). This can be taken as both
a strength and a weakness. Students, especially
older students, likely don’t take the NAEP as seriously as they take the SAT, ACT, or high-stakes
state tests, so their scores may underestimate their
actual achievement. On the other hand, the fact
that the NAEP is not a high-stakes test means that
there are almost no test-gaming efforts to artificially
increase scores. (This also applies to both of the
international tests discussed later.)
Claims that recent gains in NAEP trends indicate
the success of No Child Left Behind have been
widely disputed—in fact, it appears that NAEP
increases slowed after NCLB came into existence
(Fuller, Wright, Gesicki, & Kang, 2007). Such
claims would not be valid in any case, because the
NAEP was not designed to measure the performance of schools. The assessment attempts to cover a
broad range of knowledge and skills, but it doesn’t
rest on any specific curriculum or theory of
learning. NAEP has nothing to say about education
quality at the district or school level and little to say
about the smallest reported unit, the state.
Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA)
PISA has tested 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years since 2000. It
always measures all three topics, but each administration emphasizes one. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) administers PISA to students in the 30
countries that comprise the OECD and to a similar
number of partner nations. The next PISA report,
which will emphasize reading, will be published in
2010.
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