This week the Grand Rapids Press editorial board endorsed the the Michigan State Board of Education’s recent call to raise the MEAP “cut score,” a topic I addressed just recently. It’s a move that is done under the ever popular call for “tougher standards” and induces panic in a public that knows very little about what standardized test scores really tell us.
They close the editorial with the mantra we’ve heard from “reformers” since the start of the Assessment Era of public education:
Michigan students have to compete on a national and international stage. Let’s give them the right yardstick to determine how they’re doing, and the right tools to do better.
Just what we need. More yard sticks. More tests.
The premise of the editorial and, apparently, the state Board’s call, is the disparity between the most widely reported “National Report Card, ” known as the NAEP test and the state of Michigan’s equivalent, the MEAP.
Far from new ground, this recent discovery by the state board has been widely studied, as testament read this June, 2008 piece published by the Center for Public Education goes deep on this very issue of trying to compare the National Assessment of Educational Progress against state specific assessments. The Center hits the topic again in this in this article. Among the Center’s conclusions are that state tests and NAEP do not have the same standard of measure for what each deems student “proficiency” and even more fundamentally the two tests don’t measure the same things.
Perhaps an analogy would be measuring your child’s height in feet in the morning and then in meters in the afternoon and wondering why they aren’t the same. It’s that ridiculous.
I wonder how many people stop to contemplate just how much time and attention our schools put into these standardized tests when, ultimately, they serve as a very poor proxy of true academic development. I’ll treat this topic in future entries. But the irony is thick after the recent snow days across the Midwest contrasted to recent outcry about the “shrinking school year.” Let’s start counting how many days our schools dedicate to drilling for standardized tests and trend THAT data since 1983. Any “reformers” up for that?