Teachers at three Seattle schools are refusing to give students district-mandated standardized exams, one of the most dramatic moves in an escalating fight nationwide over using test scores toevaluate teachers and schools.
Just one month later at Stuyvesant high school, students used cell phones to share test questions and answers on the 2012 Regents exams, a test used by New York State toevaluate core subjects.
To stay with the metaphor, we can compute an optimal route through New York (the creation of a test), we can send a robot to drive the route (test execution) and check if the route conforms to the map (evaluate the outcome).
The bottom line to the report is that policy discussions right now focus more on how totest students, what they should learn, how to make their schools better, and how toevaluateand improve teachers, instead of on the single biggest determiner of academic success: student motivation.