EdWeek Chat on High Stakes Testing

Education Week recently hosted a Live Chat with David Berliner and Sharon Nichols, the authors of Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.

A couple of excerpts:

David Berliner:
I think accountability is needed for any expenditure of public dollars. But having people give an account--telling what they are doing to educate kids is not the way we have chosen to view accountability. Its our narrowing of this concept of accountability to tests thats one problem and then we make it worse by narrowing our notion of acceptable data to tests that are cheap to make and score. Both forms of narrowing make the system we have created awful. By putting high-stakes on the results of these tests we have school personnel avoiding real accountability and giving the politicians what they want--high test scores! So every state has its own state test scores going up ( through smoke and mirrors, drill and practice, cheating, forcing kids out, etc--all described in our book) and this allows all politicians say "see, we are holding the schools accountable" and many folks are happy. But the kids are getting a lousy curriculum and the teachers are not allowed to use their best professional judgment and their morale has been destroyed.

Question from Bob Alexander:
In states with high stakes graduation requirements using state-developed tests, have we seen any indication that there's been an increase in national testing performance, e.g., SATs and ACTs?
David Berliner:
Actually the opposite seems true. There are three studies I encountered that show a LOSS in SAT scores and i think there was one that showed a loss in ACT scores as a function of high stakes testing. This actually makes some sense. If a state develops standards and tests to match the standards, then they have a more circumscribed curriculum because their curriculum must reflect those standards and those tests. On the other hand the SAT and the ACT (especially) have a conception of the common high school curriculum and base their tests on that common/50 state/ typical curriculum. If your state moves into high-stakes testing you've narrowed your states curriculum and it stands to reason that you've lost a point here and there on the SATs and the ACTs. Thats what seemes to have happenned. There is good evidence that the NAEP hasnt moved as a function of making all states high-stakes testing states. In the journal Education Policy Analysis Archives is an article by Nichols, Glass and Berliner which makes that point quite well.