They say tying a standardized test to lifelong decisions about children threatens to decrease their chances of success - especially those already poorly served by the system. In the absence of effective services for low-performing students, they see increased dropout rates and growing numbers of children being placed in stigmatized remedial groups, already overpopulated by poor and minority children. They also anticipate the pressure of test scores will cause more people to leave the teaching profession, already drained by low pay and lack of incentives. Finally, they say test-driven academics could make schooling a rote, arid process that will further alienate students from true learning. The mechanisms that states have come up with are very poor instruments.
Tests are cheap and attractive, and they allow the facade of objectivity to rank kids and schools.
But it is like making serious medical judgments on the basis of a blood pressure test. Higher standards Mitzi Wright displays a list of student skills dictated by South Carolina's new curriculum standards. I can score only a single thing they can do. Administered to grades 3 through 8 beginning last year, PACT is South Carolina's response to the national effort to better schools through accountability for test scores. The test, adopted in similar forms throughout the nation, measures skills and knowledge the state has sanctioned in a set of new, tougher curriculum standards.