Gotcha

 Gotcha!

 

Where oh where have those high stakes tests gone??  Back in the day of the No Child Left Behind debacle every student was going to be on grade level by 2014.  It was never very clear just when during 2014 that would happen but we were all assured that it would.  Except it didn’t.  

In the process of making this dream come true school districts began testing kids right, left and center.  There were exams at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year.  .Probably why the legislation was also called "No Teacher with a Behind". Over half of the 50 states required these exams. High stakes tests were designed to make sure that every child who graduated from high school would be on grade level and ready for career and college.  Except they weren’t.   Institutions of higher education reported that the number of freshmen needing remedial course work before starting college did not go down; in fact, the number crept up just a bit.

We keep jumping and shouting for research-based teaching when it comes to methodology.  Yet the research regarding high stakes testing lends little support to the process.  Research has repeatedly shown that the use of an exit exam does NOT increase a student’s academic achievement or employability.  What these tests do achieve is an increase in the number of drop outs by kids who have failed the tests.  Generally, these students are often low-income, children of color or both.

In a 2022 study, Papay and his colleagues analyzed the high school graduation rates of students who just barely passed the math exit exam with those who just barley failed it.  The two groups were roughly similar in academic prowess.  They differed mainly by a couple of points on the exam.  The study found that the students who passed had a greater likelihood of staying in school and graduating.  But the kids who just barely failed were more likely to feel defeated and quit school.  Interestingly, for the small number of students who failed the exam but who prevailed on appeal- they were just as likely to stay in school and graduate as the kids who had passed initially.

That brings us back to what is the point of the exam.   Surely the reliability of any test is not so precise as to be able to determine within a couple of points whether a child is competent enough to graduate high school.   Yet we are acting as if we think they are.

Happily, the pandemic caused the canceling of many high-stakes tests.   And now the number of states that are still playing GOTCHA and requiring them- well that is down to eight.  Hopefully the next count will be at zero