The Collateral Damage of No Child Left Behind
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The single-topic blog JuryGeek has an excellent post on the increasing prevalence of "jury illiteracy" --
Now if the body of knowledge within a field is clearly demarcated and universally agreed upon, then perhaps a standardized achievement test poses little downside risk. AP Chemistry is, um, chemistry — there's little if any debate about exactly what a student should have learned going into the test. Even the bar exam is probably defensible on those grounds. There may be too much material subject to testing, but exactly what that material is has been very clearly delineated, at least on the Multistate Bar Examination if not on the state-specific portions.
It's hard to imagine how value judgments or personal preferences could find their way onto an AP Chemistry exam, or even the MBE. But when you expand standardized achievement testing to more nebulous concepts such as "American History" or "English Literature" or "Economics" or "Third Grade," the external canonical constraint on the examiner is no longer present. Choices about content now have to be made and priorities set. Of course, such choices had to be made before NCLB too — but they were made by the teachers, and the school districts and the states and maybe even the parents. Now they're made by Washington.
And that can't be good.
Perhaps the exclusion of jury instruction was merely a case of benign neglect — an oversight. Perhaps it will be changed some day. But how long will that take? How much more quickly can teachers and the local educational bureaucracies correct oversights and adapt to changing curricular needs and priorities? But with NCLB, it will all become about "teaching the test." And it will be Washington's test.
That idea flunks the smell test.
UPDATE: To clarify, and to address a concern raised in the comments, NCLB does not create a single, federal set of standardized tests. Rather, it requires the states, as a precondition to receiving federal education funding, to implement a standardized testing scheme of their own choosing -- so long as that scheme meets NCLB requirements.
I'm not sure the distinction between "federal tests" and "state tests that meet federal standards" is very meaningful. Either is troubling.
A detailed description of NCLB's testing requirements prepared by the Congressional Research Service can be found here.
[W]hy are 95% of students not receiving an education on the branch of government they are most likely to personally participate in?I'm actually a big fan of standardized aptitude tests such as the SAT, GMAT and LSAT. But standardized achievement tests, such as college AP exams or of course the bar exam, cannot escape some element of content bias, a/k/a "teach the test."
The answer is obvious: the jury system is not mentioned in the standardized achievement tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind act.
Now if the body of knowledge within a field is clearly demarcated and universally agreed upon, then perhaps a standardized achievement test poses little downside risk. AP Chemistry is, um, chemistry — there's little if any debate about exactly what a student should have learned going into the test. Even the bar exam is probably defensible on those grounds. There may be too much material subject to testing, but exactly what that material is has been very clearly delineated, at least on the Multistate Bar Examination if not on the state-specific portions.
It's hard to imagine how value judgments or personal preferences could find their way onto an AP Chemistry exam, or even the MBE. But when you expand standardized achievement testing to more nebulous concepts such as "American History" or "English Literature" or "Economics" or "Third Grade," the external canonical constraint on the examiner is no longer present. Choices about content now have to be made and priorities set. Of course, such choices had to be made before NCLB too — but they were made by the teachers, and the school districts and the states and maybe even the parents. Now they're made by Washington.
And that can't be good.
Perhaps the exclusion of jury instruction was merely a case of benign neglect — an oversight. Perhaps it will be changed some day. But how long will that take? How much more quickly can teachers and the local educational bureaucracies correct oversights and adapt to changing curricular needs and priorities? But with NCLB, it will all become about "teaching the test." And it will be Washington's test.
That idea flunks the smell test.
UPDATE: To clarify, and to address a concern raised in the comments, NCLB does not create a single, federal set of standardized tests. Rather, it requires the states, as a precondition to receiving federal education funding, to implement a standardized testing scheme of their own choosing -- so long as that scheme meets NCLB requirements.
I'm not sure the distinction between "federal tests" and "state tests that meet federal standards" is very meaningful. Either is troubling.
A detailed description of NCLB's testing requirements prepared by the Congressional Research Service can be found here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- No Gender Left Behind
- Hey, Congress, Leave Them Tests Alone!
- Report on Teacher Salaries Flunks
- No Child Left Where?
- Summer the Little Children
- The Collateral Damage of No Child Left Behind
- No Branch of Government Left Behind
Posted by KipEsquire on
11 July 2005
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