Testing Charade : Pretending to Make Schools Better

In this new book, Dan Koretz, the US’s leading expert in educational testing and measurement, openly names the failures caused by our testing policies. He documents some of the most egregious misuses and outright abuses of testing that have been imposed in the name of accountability, and he explains?and concretely illustrates?some of the most serious negative effects. Test-based accountability has led teachers to waste time on all manner of undesirable test preparation, for example, teaching children tricks to answer multiple-choice questions or ways to game the tests’ scoring rubrics. Testing and test preparation have therefore displaced a sizeable share of actual instruction, in a school year that is already short by international standards. Test-based accountability has led to a corruption of the ideals of teaching. In an apparently increasing number of cases, it has led to manipulation of the tested population (for example, findings ways to keep low achievers from being tested) and outright cheating, some instances of which have led to criminal charges and even imprisonment. And it has created gratuitous and often enormous stress for educators, parents, and most important, students. Koretz is not arguing here that test-based accountability has been a total failure. There have been a few positive effects, but they are paltry compared to the varied and severe harms it has caused. Though the evidence of these failures has been accumulating for more than twenty years, it is routinely ignored?in the design of educational programs, in public reporting of educational ?progress,” and in decisions about the fates of schools, students, and educators. Dan Koretz has written this book so that the evidence can no longer be overlooked.

Daniel Koretz is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.