You may have seen that Ohio has released its  School District Report Cards recently and articles on the local news have appeared. The district’s position is in opposition to using this method to rate the quality of schools and school districts. Realtors and newspapers like this kind of system because it allows them to neatly talk about which districts are “good” and which are not. While we aren’t opposed to assessments that provide us with information on how students are performing in academic areas (yes…tests can be useful), using tests to rank schools and make judgments on their quality  is inappropriate, unethical and counter-productive.  

The Nation Wasn’t At Risk

The creation of the testing movement began after a report that was commissioned by the Federal Government was released that painted a very negative picture of public education. That report,  called A Nation At Risk, was published in 1983 and, plainly, it lied. It had a profound impact on many important things that occurred in public education beginning in the 80s through present day. I recently had the opportunity to hear first hand from the person that facilitated the group of individuals that took part in the meetings (Jim Harvey) and wrote the final report. He relayed the discourse of the meetings to a group of superintendents and said that the information the commission used to write the report was gathered and used in such a way to support the group’s preconceived beliefs. In short, they wrote a predetermined outcome and then pulled together evidence to support it.

In order to answer the question of, why don’t we emphasize test score performances, one needs to think about why these types of assessments exist in the first place. While the state assessments do give individual student performance results to parents, one of the primary purposes of the assessments is to rank school districts and this kind of assessment approach was never designed to rank or weigh in on school quality. That’s a concept that elected officials made up.   In addition, because the assessments are  standardized, it means they are designed to distribute themselves to create a bell shaped curve. For every high achievement score, there must be a low achievement score and because the growth measure (a.k.a. value-added) is directly related to the achievement test, that method of measurement is also flawed because it too is standardized so It is statistically impossible for everyone to have a chance at success in this kind of model. What transpires is again a bell shaped curve that is used to say, “this school is a quality one and this one is not; these groups of students are literate and these are not.” The problem with this approach is that inaccurate conclusions are reached.