Dear Neighbors and especially Parents of School-Aged Children: Thought it would be interesting and informative for people to know exactly HOW these High-Stakes Standardized Tests are scored and by whom.
http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-test-scorer It's bad enough teachers do not get to see the tests or know how their students did on them; well at least not while we are still teaching them that is. Scores that is school rankings are not delivered until months after testing and by then most of us do not teach these children anymore, so these tests cannot affect instruction as claimed except for cutting programs for more Test Prep. What's worse is that the fate of students, teachers and the decisions to close neighborhood schools are ostensibly dependent upon these test scores. If you have school-aged children, this is important information as to how your child will be judged as a success or a failure.-Wilma Below is an excerpt: "Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target. In the test-scoring centers in which I have worked, located in downtown St. Paul and a Minneapolis suburb, the workforce has been overwhelmingly white—upwards of 90 percent. Meanwhile, in many of the school districts for which these scores matter the most—where officials will determine whether schools will be shut down, or kids will be held back, or teachers fired—the vast majority are students of color. As of 2005, 80 percent of students in the nation’s twenty largest school districts were youth of color. The idea that these cultural barriers do not matter, since we are supposed to be grading all students by the same standard, seems far-fetched, to say the least.
