There are those who think American public education is in shambles and needs to be completely remade, arguing that the standardized tests mandated by No Child Left Behind will be a vital tool in turning around U.S. schools: They say student promotion and graduation, teacher pay and employment, and school funding should all be tied to NCLB tests. As someone who spent many years working in the assessment industry -- not to mention someone who has been reading the newspaper for the last ten years -- I can't say I understand that idea. What exactly has occurred in standardized testing over the last decade that justifies such belief in large-scale assessments, or such blind faith in the completely unregulated, massively profitable industry that writes and scores NCLB tests?
We know that testing data can be manipulated to tell any story. We know that a school administration -- by making test questions easier or lowering cut scores -- can portray improvement in its classrooms even when such improvement doesn't really exist, as happened most recently in 2009 in the New York City schools. We know that "rogue" teachers or administrators -- by erasing incorrect student answers and changing them to correct ones -- can show student achievement even if there is no such achievement, as scandals in Atlanta and Detroit during 2010 both revealed and the current erasure debacle in Washington, D.C. also seems to show. And we know, from my book, that the testing companies fudge numbers all the time, whether reliability numbers (to show the industry is doing a more "standardized" job than it really is); validity numbers (to show the industry is doing a more accurate job than it really is); or score distribution numbers (when test scoring companies work to ensure student results match the predictions of their own psychometricians).
Psychometricians, of course, are the rock stars of the testing world, omniscient statisticians doing a job virtually no one comprehends. While I don't claim to understand their mysterious math, I do find it odd that during my long career writing and scoring tests I only once laid eyes on a psychometrician, and that was during a pick-up soccer game on the grassy grounds of ETS. Never when I wrote tests, or scored tests, or met with teachers to discuss those tests, did I see a psychometrician, meaning the most important people in the testing industry are people who don't often know what the tests look like and don't usually see the students' answers to them.
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