Eliminating standardized testing is not the “equitable” move that some advocates claim.
We’ve seen districts in New Jersey inflate their outcomes to hide the fact that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to for vulnerable kids. An audit during the Corzine years found that the district of Newark was naming courses with more advanced titles than the skills they were actually teaching in the class, recalled Derrell Bradford, a former education advocate in New Jersey, and now president of the national advocacy group 50CAN.
“The ability to compare across districts is an essential tool of an equitable system,” Bradford said. Dumping our graduation test, an effort supported by the state’s largest teacher’s union, is “a cynical move” that would allow districts “to spin a good narrative about high school graduation.” Just knowing that academic gaps broadly increased isn’t enough; it’s “extremely important” for school leaders to find out precisely where their students’ weaknesses lie so they can target their interventions, said Joshua Glazer of George Washington University, an expert in improving high poverty schools. You won’t get that level of data from the SAT and ACT, he noted.in predicting college success, and that’s usually true – but without standardized tests, we are powerless against grade inflation.
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