RCS 2011 MEAP by School

It is unfortunate that academic professionals and administrations have to expend so much energy in damage control mode because of the singular emphasis placed on test scores of little significance to learning. The American people have been mislead into believing that a single score on a paper and pencil test actually provides some meaningful information about learning. Therefore they hold all of education accountable for a meaningless measure (see http://www.alfiekohn.org for research supporting this conclusion). Worse yet politicians and the media, two groups with really short term views, proceed to discredit the teaching profession, parents, children and unions in order to sell product and win elections.

Worldwide the educational community no longer relies on scores from standardized tests as a measure of educational progress. Finland, a leader in educational achievement based upon long term outcomes, does not use standardized tests. In fact, the leader of their educational system said in a recent interview that if you want to know if a child is learning ask a teacher. Finland also focuses on equal educational opportunity for all and holds the teaching profession in higher regard than other professions.

To improve educational outcomes you must first address the weaknesses of the system, the same action you must take to correct deficiencies in any system or process. Using a single lagging indicator from an efficiently uniform but useless measurement instrument focused on short term memory function is insanity. It also ignores the infinite amount of cognitive diversity present in any size group on any given day.

If we are going to improve the learning and begin to correct social inequities in our society we would do well to end the autocratic top down regimen of standardized testing, the isolation of educational systems, take meaningful actions to listen to teachers and create funding that ends the discrimination of opportunity in our schools. Those actions support a vision of children learning.