The problem with Pearson-designed tests that threatens thousands of scores
I agree. Students who got to read the passages ahead of time had an advantage – of course, is anyone looking to see if there was a “hit” on other textbook passages – is this luck or is it corruption. Either way – it smells like corruption. There is a conflict of interest if you're testing and selling textbooks to help kids do better on testing. “students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge—whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum—before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between “good” and “poor” readers is necessarily called into question. Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don’t realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year’s now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State.”
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