Assessment High Stakes and Alternative Visions: Appropriate Use of the Right Tools to Leverage Improvement

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.or g