If only the good news about Wisconsin education was true

If only the good news about Wisconsin education was true - Roger Frank Bass:

Finally, there was some really good news about education. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the percentage of proficient readers in the third grade had increased from 64.8% in 1998 to 87.4% in 2005. And this improvement was broad-based - every minority group advanced substantially.

If only it were true

Deception No. 1: Test questions, their scoring and definitions of "proficiency" changed constantly. The number of test items, the kinds of items (multiple choice vs. short answer) and their content varied every year the test was given. The score needed for proficiency dropped more than 40%, from 50 in 1998 to 29 in 2005.

That sleight of hand entailed complex statistics to estimate how hard the revised test might be for the next crop of third-graders. That estimate, rather than criteria for effective reading, became the cutoff for proficiency. Obviously, even if mathematics could prove that two tests are equally hard, changing the questions every year meant that subsequent tests weren't assessing the same thing. The tests were apples and oranges, and the mathematics a red herring.

Deception No. 2: Reading skills were less important than student guessing, and the test's margin of error. Fifty-three of the test's 58 items were multiple choice with four possible answers. So on average, students guessed 13 answers correctly. In addition, the test's margin of error was six points.

Now remember, only 29 correct were needed for "proficiency" in 2005. So with 13 for guessing and six for test error, we have 19 of those 29 (65%). And that's only the beginning. The statistical estimates of proficiency contributed additional error margins that were never added to the students' scores.

Read the whole damn thing. 

This whole state-sponsored standardized testing scheme is rife with corruption, idiotic test items, unreliable data, useless assessments, low quality measures of student ability, and flat out manipulation, gaming and corruption.

The stories are starting to come out, but it will be years before we understand the extent of it.  

We have to come back to our senses and do what is best for our kids and our schools:  return control and resources back to the people that the local community has hired to teach their children.