Great Lakes Center For Education Research & Practice

http://www.greatlakescenter.org

High-stakes testing undermines school reform, report finds

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Teri Battaglieri (248) 444-7071 (e-mail) greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org
Dan Laitsch (778) 782-7589 (e-mail) dlaitsch@sfu.ca

EAST LANSING, Mich., Nov. 27, 2006 – High-stakes tests, which are used to measure student and school achievement, have so many negative consequences that they are actually undermining the goal of improving public education, according to a new policy brief released today by The Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

High-stakes testing, the dominant school reform tool of the federal No Child Left Behind law, actually “corrupts the system it intends to improve and is unlikely to produce positive change,” said Daniel A. Laitsch, author of Assessment, high-stakes, and alternative visions: Appropriate use of the right tools to leverage improvement.

Laitsch recommends that policymakers: abandon high-stakes accountability systems and instead focus on improving our schools’ capacity to meet student needs; look to education professionals to determine the proper use of testing; and expand assessments to evaluate the diverse goals of education.

“There is no silver bullet for school improvement,” he said. “Simplistic accountability mechanisms focused on single outcomes, measures and faulty assumptions....cannot adequately assess the work of teachers, schools and students or provide sufficient information for policy decisions.”

In the report, Laitsch, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, highlights the following proven problems associated with high-stakes testing:

Narrowing of curriculum and instructional strategies, giving students “an impoverished academic experience.”
Cheating and other negative behaviors designed to avoid punishments for poor performance.
Shortchanging high- and low-achieving students by diverting resources and services toward those whose scores are closest to the cutoff between passing and failing for a particular test.
Testing errors that damage such things as college admissions for students and school success under NCLB.

Laitsch points out that there are a variety of other promising models of assessment, some incrementally different from NCLB while others represent a radical departure from the high-stakes assessment model.

The full policy brief is available at http://www.greatlakescenter.org.

The mission of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to identify, develop, support, publish and widely disseminate empirically sound research on education policy and practices designed to improve the quality of public education for all students within the Great Lakes Region.

Visit the Great Lakes Center website at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org