Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

The Common Core standards do not demand that he sit in front of a computer for 8 hours. The testing requirement is in the No Child Left Behind Act, and the requirements about accommodations come from the US Department of Education.

Also, I don't understand in what way the tests don't tell you anything about the child's learning. [b]If the child can't pass the grade-level test[/b], then the child is not at grade level -- right?[/quote]

The tests cherry-pick certain standards and over emphasize them. So you will never know exactly which standard your child is weak in to be able to target that area. Instead, a child will drown trying to improve on every standard.[/quote]

Which standards do the tests cherry-pick and overemphasize, and how do you know this?

Also, the tests are not designed to characterize your child's strengths and weaknesses. They are designed to demonstrate whether or not the children in that grade in that school, as a group, are meeting the grade-level standards -- because that's the purpose of the tests, according to the federal law that requires them.[/quote]

[b]A dissection of Common Core math test questions leaves educator ‘appalled’[/b]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/30/a-dissection-of-common-core-math-test-questions-leaves-educator-appalled/

Using the sample of released items in the New York Common Core tests, I recently spent some time looking over the eighth-grade math results and items to see what was to be learned – and I came away appalled at what I found.

Readers will recall that the whole point of the standards is that they be embedded in complex problems that require both content and practice standards. But what were the hardest questions on the 8th grade test? Picayune, isolated, and needlessly complex calculations of numbers using scientific notation. And in one case, an item is patently invalid in its convoluted use of the English language to set up the prompt, as we shall see.

As I have long written, there is a sorry record in mass testing of sacrificing validity for reliability. This test seems like a prime example. Score what is easy to score, regardless of the intent of the Common Core Standards. [b]There are 28 eighth-grade math standards. Why do such arguably less important standards have at least five items related to them? (Who decided which standards were most important? Who decided to test the standards in complete isolation from one another simply because that is psychometrically cleaner?)
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