The Testing Bubble Bursts

(The Nation)  This column was written by Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

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Looks like the $2.3 billion standardized testing industry forgot to devise a much needed self-examination.

Two weeks ago, after two students paid fees to have their SATs rescored by hand, it was discovered that 4,000 students had received scores that were incorrectly low. A week later, the College Board announced that another batch of 1,600 exams had to be rescanned. The Washington Post now reports that another 27,000 exams still need to be rechecked.

Also two weeks ago, CTB/McGraw-Hill acknowledged that questions from sample tests were mistakenly placed on the actual exam used by the NCLB regime to assess schools and students for 400,000 7th & 8th graders in New York.

And the banner month for the industry ended with the Educational Testing Service reaching an $11 million settlement with 27,000 people who were wrongly scored on their teacher certification exams, including 4,100 who were failed incorrectly.

As Robert Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) puts it: "If you're waiting for the other shoe to drop – this is more like a centipede."

The testing establishment has predictably responded with calls for more oversight, as reported by Karen Arenson in the New York Times.

"We need accountability," said George Madaus of the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy.

"It's pretty clear, I guess, that the quality control issues need to be looked at again," said College Board advisory committee member, Dr. Robert Linn.

"We need accuracy and security and all these things," added New York State senator Kenneth LaValle.

But are we even asking the right questions about standardized testing? For starters, consider how dramatically standardized testing has been transformed of late.

Diane Ravitch writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education that until recently high school teachers and college professors wrote, graded, and periodically revised the tests. Now state and federal governments under bureaucratic pressures set and change the standards regularly rather than professional educators.

Ken Himmelman, Dean of Admissions at Bennington College, also notes a contemporary economic bias: "The college board was designed to level the playing field in 1900. But the more important the test has become, the more wealthier students and schools pay to prepare for it...so now it just reinforces the economic divide."

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