"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Saturday, May 30, 2015

State Changes Test Score Numbers for Students to Mollify Parents

If you have a highly unpopular Common Core testing system, such as the one in Tennessee, that is guaranteed to produce widespread failure among students and their teachers, what do you do when the scores come out just before the end of school?

Simple. You let the test vendor produce a phony "quick" score that looks like students are proficient, and you send those scores to schools and homes so that they can be used to figure into final student grades.  In doing so, state officials and testing companies hope that parents will put away their pitchforks and torches, and go on vacation.  

Teachers can then be told that these "quick" scores aren't the real scores, you know, the ones that will be used to decide teacher individual and collective employment fates.  The real scores, which are much, much lower than the phony ones just used to mark grades and placate parents, will be used for teacher evaluation.

If it had not been for the widespread celebrations at schools across Tennessee for the miracle improvements everyone was seeing, the corporate Department of Education that Huffman built would, no doubt, still be mum on the subject.  But with fireworks going off and confetti raining down statewide, the duplicitous fools in Nashville had to come up with a totally obfuscating explanation of their scheme.

Who will be the first to sue? 

Story here from Chalkbeat.

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