12.1 High-stakes testing by states  (Page 2/5)

Alignment of standards, testing and classroom curriculum

The state tests must be aligned with strong content standards in order to provide useful feedback about student learning. If there is a mismatch between the academic content standards and the content that is assessed then the test results cannot provide information about students’ proficiency on the academic standards. A mismatch not only frustrates the students taking the test, teachers, and administrators it undermines the concept of accountability and the “theory of action” (See box “Deciding for yourself about the research”) that underlies the NCLB. Unfortunately, the 2006 Federation of Teachers study indicated that in only 11 states were all the tests aligned with state standards (American Federation of Teachers, 2006).

State standards and their alignment with state assessments should be widely available—preferably posted on the states websites so they can be accessed by school personnel and the public. A number of states have been slow to do this. [link] summarizes which states had strong content standards, tests that were aligned with state standards, and adequate documents on online. Only 11 states were judged to meet all three criteria in 2006.

Sampling content

When numerous standards have been developed it is impossible for tests to assess all of the standards every year, so the tests sample the content, i.e. measure some but not all the standards every year. Content standards cannot be reliably assessed with only one or two items so the decision to assess one content standard often requires not assessing another. This means if there are too many content standards a significant proportion of them are not measured each year. In this situation, teachers try to guess which content standards will be assessed that year and align their teaching on those specific standards. Of course if these guesses are incorrect students will have studied content not on the test and not studied content that is on the test. Some argue that this is a very serious problem with current state testing and Popham (2004) an expert on testing even said: “What a muddleheaded way to run a testing program.” (p. 79)

Adequate yearly progress (ayp)

Under NCLB three levels of achievement, basic, proficient and advanced, must be specified for each grade level in each content area by each state. States were required to set a time table from 2002 that insured an increasing percentage of students would reach the proficient levels such that by 2013-14, so every child is performing at or the proficient level. Schools and school districts who meet this timetable are said to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP).