Recently I went through some reasons to be suspicious of attempts to evaluate teachers based on standardized tests. Here's another: A school board member took his state's standardized 10th grade math and reading tests. The results?
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities. [...]
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
It certainly would be nice to see more policymakers taking the tests that they say are so perfect to assess what students are learning and how well teachers are teaching.
There are questions about whether the tests accurately and reliably measure what they're supposed to measure. This man's experience raises questions about whether the tests even attempt to measure the right things.