By John Fensterwald Four states have encountered serious glitches and system meltdowns over the past several weeks as they have moved their own state assessments online. But the head of the state-led consortium creating the Common Core tests for California and two dozen other states expressed confidence Wednesday that his organization is working closely with [...]
BREAKING NEWS: Pearson errors on gifted and talented screening tests for NYS students mean that too few qualified students were identified. @GothamSchools reports: From Pearson re @nycschools G&T exams: “We are very sorry to report that errors at Pearson occurred …” Feel like we’ve heard this before — GothamSchools (@gothamschools) April 19, 2013 Pearson on [...]
If you want to make a lot of money and screw over millions of children, particularly inner-city children, all at the same time (and who doesn’t want to do that?), then join my favorite Governor Paul LePage and invest heavily in on-line learning. Studies have shown on-line learning to be a total sham when it [...]
Is there a light at the end of the teach-to-the-test tunnel? A quirky pineapple that grabbed news headlines in the spring of 2012 may have marked a turning point in how much stock is given to a standardized test’s ability to accurately measure what children know. First, flickering sparks of discontent flashed up from parents [...]
The New Republic has an interesting analysis of Louisiana’s experiment in privatization of public schools: Ed Kilgore argues in “How the GOP’s New Education Policy Embraces the Market and Abandons Objective Standards” that vouchers pander to parents as the ultimate source of “accountability.” But this emphasis on parents’ subjective evaluation of a school’s worth (private [...]
Readers of the Vanity Fair piece highlighting Microsoft’s decade of failure to innovate and resulting loss of market share can’t help but notice the close parallels between that company’s decline and their corporate practice of “stack ranking.” “Stack ranking,” as described in “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Software [...]
“Equipercentile equating” is fancy-talk for “don’t like the percentages of failing students? Lower the passing score.” The New York Times recently covered the flap, in which a proficiency grade of 4 on written tests yielded “too many” failures but a grade of 3 magically gave the same results as last year: 81% of students passed. [...]