C-Test

Why is it that politicians whip the public into a fervor over the quality of public education but provide absolutely no oversight on the quality of the corporate testing industry? Think about this:

If a public school announced that they were going to administer a test at year's end, and that it would be the sole determining factor as to whether a student graduates or not; and, that there would be no information available after the test as to which items the student answered correctly; and further, that there could be no examination of the scoring rubric, no release of test items and no examination of the test's overall pedagogical appropriateness or fairness--how long would it take for protests, investigations and lawsuits to appear?

Answer: a matter of weeks.

Yet, remarkably, across the United States, while the testing industry has expanded at an astronomical rate, there has been no questioning or examination of the quality of their product: its utility, accuracy or fairness. Are all these tests even valid? Are they reliable? Are the test items even correct, coherent or unbiased?

Answer: The public doesn't know.

Why not? Because only two states, Massachusetts and New York allow the public to peer inside the "black box" at the actual tests themselves. In most states, revealing the content of the tests--in fact, not returning every single test booklet--constitutes felony theft, let alone automatic failure under No Child Left Behind. In other words, these tests, paid for by public money, are corporate property and are somehow beyond public examination--even though they ultimately determine who wins and who loses in the giant game of educational accountability.

Well, that's bullshit. (Excuse me, but it is.) It's time the public, and particularly educators, stood up and demanded to know what is inside the corporate black boxes that now control most everything that happens in public school.

As in: What are you trying to hide?

This group is predicated on collecting information, organizing opposition and directing questions to policy-makers and stakeholders around the country in regards to their standardized testing practices, and especially their instruments. NCLB may be a particularly egregious example of the elevation of testing the status of deity in our education system, but let's face it: the testing imperative preceded NCLB and it will be with us long after NCLB has been relegated to the dustbin of history.

By adding your state abbreviation after the acronym above, we could in effect, put in place a group in all 50 states, i.e. C-TEST-NC, C-TEST-TX. Testing, after all, happens at the state level and so opposition and questions must come from within each state.

I know there are groups out there already fighting on this issue, but I think it is vital that intelligent, grounded and professional questions get asked by educators, whose very job it is to evaluate students, curriculum and achievement.

The opening salvo has to be: We need to see these tests. What's in them, and what's on them. Thus, the acronym C-TEST.

What are they trying to hide?