A game of ‘Good Test, Bad Test’

[Valin]

AEIdeas:

Michael McShane

January 24, 2013

 

Teachers in Seattle are refusing to participate in a set of assessments designed to measure student growth over the course of a school year. The MAP, or Measures of Academic Progress, is used by the Seattle public schools as a supplement to their end of the year summative exams in order to track student progress and calculate teacher value-added, the specific contribution an individual teacher made to a student’s learning. The teachers don’t believe the tests are an accurate measure of student performance and object to them being used as a part of their evaluations.

 

The teachers’ efforts have won support of some of education reform’s staunchest critics. Impassioned leaders of the boycott have gone so far as to compare their struggle with that of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

 

While the opportunity to take that hyperbole to task is almost too good to pass up, I’d prefer to address some of the specific concerns that teachers have with this particular test, and why I think they’re wrong.

 

For what it’s worth, I think teachers should absolutely push back against bad tests or the use of tests to do bad things. But it doesn’t look like the MAP falls into either of those categories.

 

Let’s take a look:

 

(Snip)