Scores without meaning
Perhaps I spent too long in school; along the way I determined that marks were secondary to learning. This was reinforced when I completed my own “teacher training”, because the whole science of testing was demystified. A test can be made to demonstrate whatever the tester (and testee) decide. What on earth, then, compelled the Island government to run “standardized tests” on their captive school population, and then release those results to the public earlier this week.
Think about it. Schools (in two regional leagues) ranked before the playoffs. We know which school is in first place and which will get the best choices in the next round of trades. Wait, that’s the hockey game. This is education. Students, not teams. They don’t even get nice jerseys and a dressing room. Instead, we now have the final brick in the whole community identity wall ranked before all. With no playoffs to distract the public at the end of the season.
I’ve worked in a number of those schools. The results on a given test will vary greatly from school to school, on any given day, in any given year. To put it in simpler terms, the populations of the schools are so small that the results are statistically invalid. Nonsense. Not worth the webspace used to list them. Perhaps the good math student, out of the 6 to be tested, was absent that afternoon. Perhaps a pencil broke. A waste of good class time.
I also have spent years working in another educational system, where schools are ranked. Even when people say it doesn’t matter, the stigma of a “poor showing” hangs overheard. Could someone please offer the decision makers of the two Island school boards some professional development. How about a simple weekend seminar on the invalidity of standard assessments. And then, just for the fun of it, test those same people on the content, and publish their scores. What’s fair is fair.
