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A few things I want to be clear about.  Tests are a good thing for determining the overall health/success of the school district.  Second, my argument simply is that our current system does a poor job of delineating the value of the tests.  We either go one of two routes.  We test less or we test a lot more.  I know you may say this sounds like it contradicts the argument below.  The argument I make is that students don't understand the value of the exam.  So either we create massive consequences for the exam (high stakes exams) or we par down a little bit and using high stakes exams every odd year or something.  Lastly, I would actually love to see local districts be able to add/customize exams with additional curriculum.  But that is for another day.

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So this is a position that will go into the face of many of those who clamor for accountability.  The argument is that if we test students they will be better prepared for the real world, we can hold teachers accountable and weed out the bad ones.  Here is the problem - they don't work.  Why don't they work.  It's a ton of reasons but I'll go ahead and bore you with just a few of the details.

Too Many Tests

That is right - we have to many tests.  So here is the catch 22 of accountability crowd.  They are that we need more district decision making, less federal/state decision making.  But on the other hand, they want some serious tests to hold the kids accountable.  Can we have too many tests.  Let's take a peek back at 2008.  The test calendar hasn't been posted yet because the team of employees needed to coordinate all of them hasn't been able to finish the calendar.

In 2008 there were nearly 50 test dates scheduled for RAS students.  Folks, that means that nearly 30% of the instruction days in the district there is a federal or state mandated test occurring.  Not only do we test kids over and over again but we are doing it at every grade level.  The problem is when we test kids over the top like this we lose the value in testing.  If students are tested 4 different times each and every year kids don't care anymore.  If I take one test over 4 years and I need it to graduate I'll care.  If I'm taking test number 18 over 4 years I don't care anymore.

Tests are testing the right stuff.well not really

Here is the problem.  What we test doesn't always line up with what is being taught in the classroom.  So the question is: is the stuff on the test represent what we want kids to know or is what is being taught in the classroom what we want.

• What you say - the tests are asking the right questions?  Yep, the problem is tests are being created/built at a state/federal level but the curriculum is being built at the local level.  They are never going to match up.  Some will tell us to look at Europe where they have standardized exit exams for graduation and how successful it is.  John Bishop does some great research of the connection of Curriculum Based Exit Exams (CBEEs) and how they are incredibly powerful at holding people accountable.  But as Bishop will even admit the United States cannot use CBEEs because we don't mandate curriculum at the federal level.  In Germany, they have a powerful set of exams that do wonders with students, but they also create/build all of the curriculum at the federal level.  We are a different world.  This of course doesn't even get into the problems tests do not take into account the heterogeneous nature of the United States compared to other nations.

So we need to make a decision.  Either the feds make curriculum decisions and we test from the federal level or we allow curriculum decisions at the local level and drop this testing system we currently have.

Well - I could go on and on and with different stats about the number of tests today increase drop out rates but I'll move onto a different issue now.