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[quote=Anonymous]I happen to work with a bunch of education researchers on exactly the issue of assessment and COVID. A lot of the conflicting points you've raised are valid.

When children are receiving very limited instructional time, the opportunity costs of giving standardized tests are very high. And there are indeed significant issues of validity--if you're at home, who is helping? How are the environment and materials? If in school--is it a normal learning environment for the child? Has the child ever been in a school/this school/with these adults? Who even will be tested? The students who are most estranged from schools right now are not likely to show up.

However, various kinds of assessments do provide important benchmarks which are used for accountability for the classroom, school, and district? A lot of the experts are currently arguing that results need to be divorced from accountability as a result of the issues above, but I'm not so sure I agree. It does not seem reasonable for schools, teachers, and districts to be held completely non-responsible for their outcomes.

Frankly, standardized tests were not designed to be performed in such widely varied environments--they will heavily skew the results. These tests were also not designed to help us answer more political questions such as whether schools should be in person. The other question is whether we really need standardized tests to tell us something we already know.

In theory, you could compare in-person districts with distance learning districts, but this comes up against issues of comparability of large assessments. There are also so many variables that I'm not sure we can account for.

Anyway, my point is basically none of you are wrong. It's a fu**ing conundrum.[/quote]

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