At our opening meeting of all of the faculty and staff in our district (which was fewer than expected as many faculty were stranded by roads washed away in floods--we figured the teacher who lived in a town that was inaccessible and had to travel through at least two other towns that were inaccessible to get to work was not going to be there!) we talked about students.
Reasonable enough-- but with new administrators I was hoping we might get to talk about authentic learning. The talk quickly turned to "how do we assess our students?" I held my breath as the principal leading the discussion said, "we know we want to use multiple methods of measuring students' success..." and then the PowerPoint slide switched, and she said, "let's look at this test data for example."
"Arg!" I understand our current political climate. But I am increasingly frustrated with leaders (no make that administrators) who talk the talk of authenticity in schools, but then "measure success" with a test score and who define themselves and judge their teachers with how well their students perform on a test.
A little later, we were having a discussion at our table, and I summarized a book chapter I had read over the summer which indicated that there is no evidence in the learning sciences to support the claim that a test is an accurate measure of human knowledge... the message was not well-received by several at my table as it immediately challenged all they "know" about education.
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