About high-stakes, standardized tests…

When a single score on a commercially produced, timed, machine scored
test can change a kid’s life chances forever, get teachers and principals
fired, close treasured neighborhood schools, change real-estate values, siphon
off billions of dollars from classrooms, and so on, attention should be paid.
Resistance to high-stakes testing has been dismissed by test fans as selfserving.
Educators, they say, just don’t want to be held accountable.
Educators say that’s nonsense, that they oppose the tests because they…
● Are making kids hate learning
● Put the wrong people—test manufacturers—in charge of education
● Lead to neglect of phys ed, music, art, and other, non-verbal ways of learning
● Provide little to no useful feedback to teachers, parents, and kids
● Unfairly advantage those who can afford test prep
● Trivialize learning
● Penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways
● Measure only short-term memory and other “low level” thinking processes
● Allow pass-fail rates to be manipulated for political purposes
● Hide problems created by margin-of-error computations in scoring
● Limit teacher ability to adapt to learner differences
● Encourage use of threats, bribes, and other extrinsic motivators
● Wrongly assume that what kids will need to know in the future is already known
● Emphasize minimum achievement to the neglect of maximum performance
● Are keyed to a deeply flawed, 19th Century curriculum
● Reduce teacher creativity and the appeal of teaching as a profession
● Are culturally biased
● Have no “success in life” predictive power
● Are open to massive scoring errors with life-changing consequences
● Are at odds with American values about individual differences and worth
● Don’t pass the cost-benefit test
● Block innovations that are too complex to be evaluated by machine
● Lead to the neglect of the best and worst students as resources are channeled to lift marginal kids above pass-fail “cut lines”
●Undermine a fundamental democratic principle that those closest to and therefore most
knowledgeable about problems are best positioned to deal with them
The corporately driven “standards and accountability” reform effort has as its aim the
privatizing of public schools. Money and power are being used to enlist the aid of both
political parties. If you think it’s a bad idea to sell off the bedrock of democracy, ask
candidates for public office where they stand on this issue. Time is short!
www.marionbrady.com/documents/Problems-HighStakesTests.pdf www.MarionBrady.com 10-6-12
Educational CyberPlayGround: Teaching to the test

K12 Education – Who Has Smarter Children, the USA or China?
They’ve had national curriculum standards and testing for over

Student Assessment and Test Preparation Resources for the Administrator…
To purchase the actual test materials, you will need to contact

The Role of International Tests in U.S. Education: Educational CyberPlayGround
the value of international comparison tests

Educational CyberPlayGround: US Citizenship Test Review
English test, you will need to take the civics test unless you

Explore K-12 State and National Curriculum Teaching Standards Reform: Educational …
experts for their perspectives on school reform and NCLB testing

Gifted Education Resources about Gifted and talented students

Data sets and content previously found at data.ed.gov can now be found at education.data.gov

Originally, we created the separate data.ed.gov portal because we wanted to provide the public with advanced features and visualization tools that were not yet available on Data.gov. Today, the Data.gov Education Community not only fully supports visualization and mapping technologies, but it benefits from the continual addition of new enhancements, tools, and features. A key new tool is an API “wizard” that will make it faster and easier to create APIs for existing and upcoming open datasets, increasing the ways developers can interact with this data.
Additionally, as part of the government-wide Digital Government Strategy and the Education Data Initiative, an increasing number of developers and data enthusiasts are looking to Data.gov as the central source for finding, analyzing, and working with government data. Ensuring that all education-related open data lives on Data.gov, instead of on a separate website, ultimately means that more people can find and interact with it, and that we can nurture a larger, stronger community of individuals focused around education data.
What moved?
Prior to today, the following 14 datasets lived exclusively on data.ed.gov. You can now find them on the education.data.gov developer page:

• Broadband Availability for U.S. Schools
• American Jobs Act: Modernizing America’s Schools and Putting Teachers Back to Work
• School Improvement 2010 Grants
• Investing In Innovation 2010 Applications
• Investing In Innovation 2010 Highest Rated
• Investing In Innovation 2011 Applications
• Promise Neighborhood 2010 Applications
• Promise Neighborhoods 2010 Grantees
• Promise Neighborhoods 2011 Applications
• Promise Neighborhoods 2011 Grantees
• Ready to Learn 2010 Applicants
• Teaching American History 2010 Applicants
• Teaching American History 2010 Grantees
• Early Learning Grants

What did not move?
As mentioned above, the URLs for existing education data APIs did not change. They were originally based off of data.gov and will continue to live there.
Currently, a developer page will continue to be hosted by ED.gov. Even as additional developer resources are added to the Data.gov Education Community, we will continue to maintain a presence at www.ed.gov/developers specifically for developers who work with education data.