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[–]guga31bbeducation policy[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Since I already criticized Bernie's college plan, now Hillary gets a turn!

Taking Bill's recent comments about standardized testing from this article:

"She thinks they are just too much, that it’s national overreach, and the most it could ever do is to help people at the very bottom levels of achievement."

Lots to unpack here.

  1. "they are just too much, that it’s national overreach": The idea that the federal government is to blame for the amount of testing is unfounded. The typical student spends 7-8 hours in testing as a result of federally-mandated assessments (source), which is about 0.5% of the school year. The bulk of student testing (2/3 of student time) is driven by state- and district- mandated tests (same source).
  2. "the most it could ever do is to help people at the very bottom levels of achievement": policies designed to promote achievement have the potential to help kids at all parts of the distribution, and the best tool we have for measuring those impacts is through testing. The well-known Chetty et al. study used the results from standardized tests to show that students assigned to teachers who raised student test scores tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by college attendance and future earnings. This stuff matters for everyone.
  3. Even if testing only helped students at the bottom of the distribution, would that really be cause to abandon them? Because of access to test scores, we are able to know things like disadvantaged students being less likely to be taught by effective teachers and minority students being systematically under-identified for gifted and talented participation. Without data, it would be much easier to ignore disparities in the availability of high-quality education.

"The idea of having to give a national test every year for five years in a row for people from the third to the eighth grade doesn’t make as much sense as investing the same amount of money in helping the teachers to be better teachers [...] That would make more difference."

Two problems with this.

  1. It's not very much money. A typical district might spend about 0.1% of its budget on testing, and even that is an overstatement of the cost of federally-mandated testing because it includes non-federally-mandated tests. This is about $27 per student.
  2. There is little to no evidence that professional development ("helping teachers to be better teachers") is effective. Several high-quality randomization studies have found no impacts on teacher effectiveness (example).