Here are some interesting links from the past week:
- The following are two links to a letter to the editor and a guest editorial that were recently published in two of Utah’s major newspapers by Lynn Stoddard who will be presenting at our conference this year. They are a plea for genuine, authentic accountability in education. Hopefully this will open some eyes to the damage that is being done with the Common Core and false accountability. The first link is to a short version that you may already have seen. The second is to an expanded version of the same concept.
- This is an excellent summary of the findings of the National Academy of Sciences report on high-stakes testing, with a specific application to Texas that is more widely relevant. Excerpt: “I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America’s test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public. Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.”
