I
really appreciate what Marjorie Larner wrote in the previous blog. Deciding
what to measure without first establishing a set of outcomes and aims is
lunacy. When you cede power to standardized test creators to determine what all
students should know, you give away a lot of other things that are central and
valuable in the education process. 
Teacher judgment and discretion, for example. Learning goals should be
set in the district and classroom, not in Washington D.C., and certainly not by
a commercial test developer.

There
are really only two things that standardized test data can tell us. The first
is what kids reliably
know and are able to do, relative to a selected set of
skills and knowledge. The second is how one child--or one school, state, or
nation--compares to another. 

The
first reason for testing is, IMHO, a no-brainer. It doesn't hurt students to
take the occasional test, especially if there is no manufactured anxiety around
the process. A good test should tell everyone involved what to do next, what's
been mastered, and where the weak spots are--useful information. Every teacher
in America should be able to construct valid tests that accurately measure what
their students are learning. And every teacher should be skilled in analyzing
the information generated by standardized tests linked to curricular goals--and
using those statistics to determine next steps. 

It
drives me crazy when teachers push up the panic and aversion level around
testing. I am a staunch advocate of performance-based assessments and using
real student work to measure growth--but I also understand that often, a criterion-referenced
test is the most efficient way to find out what students know.

Unfortunately,
your average citizen--let's call him Joe the Talker--is clueless about the difference
between tests that measure the things we have decided are essential knowledge
and skills, and the norm-referenced tests designed to sort kids into quintiles,
prescribe their futures, or compare students in the Mississippi Delta to
students in Singapore. If Joe understood how testing worked (and who really benefits
from developing stockpiles of standardized tests, and vast banks of data on
young children), he might be more willing to care more about what his kids have
learned and less worried about whether the United States is "ahead"
of the Czech Republic on the PISA. Here's an unnamed Joe, speaking his mind on
international testing, in an HBO "Real Time" Forum:

How many of those
countries ranked higher than the US use test scores on students to direct them
in to different programs?  Seems
that a few of us in here have already stated that they should use the test
scores to realize which kids they should educate and which kids they should
give job training to. Throwing more money at a poor scoring student seems like
a waste, put more money in to the better performing students education and
train those poorer performing students to do something else. You can take my
gun after I empty the clip into you.

I
have never understood the devotion of policymakers, economic analysts and
journalists to comparing  international
test data as rationale for launching massive school reforms in the United
States.  We clearly are not in a cutthroat
economic rivalry with Finland. And it must be obvious to anyone (even Joe) that
schools in other countries are incalculably different from American
schools--their size, demographics, curriculum, annual days of schooling, teacher
preparation, funding, and cultural emphasis on the importance of education,
including who actually gets to go to school.  It's equally obvious that Americans have no
intention of adopting "reform" practices from higher-scoring
nations--we're not about to add five weeks to the school year, eliminate expensive
competitive sports programs in favor of cram-school tutoring, or wait until
kids are seven years old before teaching them to read.  

Instead,
we use international testing as a rhetorical bludgeon--proof that our schools
are dreadful and we're falling further behind. "Public schools are incompetent"
has become our conventional wisdom over the past decade. The worst aspects of
this sad refrain: #1) it's not really true and #2) it makes people feel
hopeless about a system that could be greatly improved, should we decide as a
nation to invest, rather than score political points in the media.

A
must-read article on international testing, by Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell,
in Nature, makes several cogent points:

• Average
  test scores are irrelevant; what matters most in economic development and
  innovation is the numbers of highest-scoring students, and the United States
  has by far the greatest share of those, nearly twice as many as second-place
  Japan.

• National
  rankings are based on statistically insignificant differences. When nations are
  clustered into similar groups, the United States falls into a middle group in
  Math and Science, and in the highest group in Civics. Generally speaking, about
  one-fifth of nations rank above the United States, and two-fifths below.

• Comparisons
  of education as economic indicator between the United States, with a gross
  domestic product of $14 trillion, and nations like New Zealand, with a GDP of
  $124 billion, are meaningless. It makes more sense to consider individual state
  economies and industries as competitors with countries whose students take
  international tests.

•  Historically,
  creating policies to emphasize math and science instruction and increase the
  numbers of technology and engineering graduates has led to an oversupply and high
  unemployment in those fields. We appear to be heading in that direction at the
  moment.

•  The
  disaster that we should be paying attention to is the one million
  low-performing students we produce every year. These students do more than drag
  down our average. They represent the dangerous gap between educational haves
  and have-nots. 

And
if we don't believe that gaping disparity between the successful and the
disadvantaged is socially treacherous, we ought to be reading history--or
watching the protests at the G-20 Summit.

From
the estimable Deborah Meier, in Bridging Differences, best education blog on the planet:

The tendency to fit our facts to our biases
is inescapably part of our competition with each other. I suspect there’s a
purpose in this constant reiteration of bleak facts and non-facts. (Otherwise,
why is there no cheering over our incontrovertible high international test
score standing in literacy, or why is the NAEP data on pre- and post-NCLB so
rarely made public?) Hopefully, during the coming four years...we can see
“reform” as something beside a horse race or marketplace with winners and
losers.