Michael Guerriero in The New Yorker derides the uses of standardized tests to evaluate teachers, particularly the internal assessments used by schools to track student progress throughout the year. In this piece, he cites a vote by teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle to boycott the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam.
And so the MAP brings us to the very point at which teaching and testing have diverged. When students are forced to take an exam like the MAP two or three times a year so that they can be better prepared for other, more important exams, the assessment is no longer a partner to curriculum. The assessment has become the curriculum. The MAP, and tests like it, are pushing schools past the clichéd, bemoaned exercise of “teaching to the test,” to a curriculum that simply is the test. And while the exams may be a thoroughly vetted, sophisticated means of measurement, they are an inadequate, constricted form of expression. As the author and relapsed educator Garret Keizer observed in his return to teaching, of which he writes in the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, “No student I meet seems to believe that the universe formed in six days but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs.”
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