Why is a highly promising, successfully piloted technology that can help resolve a number of important issues around testing students with special needs — and save money — still sitting on the shelf?
In this case, the barrier is getting the tools to integrate into current testing processes and software platforms. Sounds complex and geeky, but [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Standardized Testing'
More Standards, Please
Bill Tucker on Technology’s Potential to Transform Academic Testing
In a new Education Sector report, Chief Operating Officer Bill Tucker, argues that technology has the potential to drastically improve our current assessment systems and practices, leading to significant improvements in teaching and learning in the nation’s classrooms.
Testing the Limits
Measuring Up, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz’s new book on educational testing, is making the rounds in the education policy and blogging worlds. My review, the latest installment in Education Sector’s “What We’re Reading” series, is now live on the ES Web site.
If You Pay Them They Will Pass
Seriously? Baltimore is putting aside nearly a $million to pay students to pass the Maryland state high school exit exams. This has got to be the worst example of how to engage students in their education, if that’s in fact the point, although it was easy enough to find students who support this idea. Of [...]
Fairfax Gives In To Testing ELLS
As the Post reports today, Fairfax County Virginia has backed down in its battle with the Dept of Ed and will administer grade level reading tests to all of its ELL students (minus those who’ve been in the country for less than a year). This struggle was hard-fought and district officials in Fairfax and elsewhere [...]
Uniting Differences
In the latest entry in an extended back-and-forth between Edwize and The Quick & The Ed on teacher policy, Leo Casey holds forth on the limitations of standardized testing. Some of it is quite thoughtful, particularly in distinguishing the union position–pro-standards, pro-standardized testing in limited contexts–from the absolutist anti-standards & testing people here.
But it seems [...]
WaPost Goes to School Room, Misses Elephant
There’s a kind of unreality running throughout today’s front-page article in the Post about students who get good grades in school, and even end up on the honor roll, but fail state standardized tests:
Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don’t [...]
Shameless Plug
Per Craig’s post below (see also this and this), part of the problem here is that a lot of the tests themselves suck. Conventional wisdom aside, it’s possible to design a standardized test that is a pretty good measure of what we want kids to learn–including higher-order thinking skills. The problem is that doing so [...]
Nauseating
Alexander Russo writes pretty much what I’ve been thinking for a long time about these anecdotal reports of kids throwing up from the pressures of high-stakes testing: It’s not the fault of NCLB, or testing; It’s the fault of adults in the schools who are creating an environment where kids feel so much stress and [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.