A good blog post about how we do evaluation in American School systems

Check out this blog post by David Berliner in the Washington Post- am interested to hear your thoughts. He is an interesting Ed Policy academic.

http://bit.ly/4IFb37

What I take from this is that we should allow teachers to take a more active role in assessing students and their learning. We should take into consideration the situation of the school, the student, etc in considering the meaning of the evaluation. We should also reconsider the kinds of assessments we give our students. For example, a multiple choice test for a surgeon may test whether or not the potential surgeon knew facts and labels but might not show whether or not the surgeon actually knew how to do surgery on real people (where body parts aren't exactly where the book says they will be).

What I am worried about and can see someone misreading is that this could be considered a call for school systems to administer more of the standardized tests that they use to evaluate students. I used to work with student teachers and licensed teachers in the state of Maryland. In one particular elementary school, it was a bit tragic the impact of increased district standardized testing had on the teaching and learning that happened. For some odd reason, this school had a lot of tests their students had to take during a period of about 2 months. During those two months, I'd say no teaching and learning occurred. Teachers and students were all focused on helping students cram for one exam, then take the exam, then cram for the next one, etc. Time for course work was supplanted by the cram time (officially called preparing students for the exam). As everyone knows, when you cram, you are not really learning. You are just trying to hold as much as so you can deliver it on the test. After you have released the floodgates and dumped all that material on the test, you are not likely to recall much of that information.