High Stakes Testing

The first website that I found that I though that was interesting was a site about things that are against State Achievement Tests. This site is called "Fair Test". It is the National Center for fair and open testing. The site has a great amount of information about testing, from K-12 Tesing to University testing. There is also a fact sheet and a resource link that can give more valuable information about high stakes testing. This website talks about the harmful effects of tesing on curriculum and instruction. It also talks about high-stakes testing exacerbates inequilities between wealthly and poor communities, and whites and students of color. This site also has a section about dropouts, retention, and high-stakes tests and how they are related. The harmful impact on bilingual students and English Language Learners that high-stakes testing has is also a section that you may refer to on this web page. The section that I found most interesting was a section titled "Testing Special Needs Students: Inclusion into flawed assessment policies and exams does more harm than good." There is much more important information that should be taken into account about testing. Here are some of the titles: Tesing Young Children, Scoring, Reporting and other errors made by testing companies in high-stakes situation, Anaylsis of the content and questions of various tests, Student voices on testing, Test pressure results in psychological harms for some children and many more!!! There is also a video about Standardized Testing Characteristics and NCLB assessing bilingual students!! You can find all this great information at the website: http://www.fairtest.org/arn/caseagainst.html


This website is called "Wrightslaw." I found this website to be very helpful while I have taken this Legal Issues class this semster! I have used the site a million times to get information about cases that I have read about. This site has a section titled: "High-Stakes Testing." It talks about the legal issues that come from state achievement testing. There is a great amount of information pertaining to children with disabilities that have to take high-stakes testing. There are articles and court cases that are a wonderful reference. This website also contains links to publications about high-stakes testing. This is a great resource to found about legal issues with state achievement testing.!!! Go check this out at: http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/highstak.index.htm

This next link is an article that I found from the Washington Post. I found this articel inspiring because it talks about other possiblities that can be used in schools besides high-stakes testing. The author of this article, Jay Matthews is a education columnist for the Washington Post. In this article, he refers to the book "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Tesing Corrupts American Schools." Mr. Matthews addresses four other suggestion that the authors of the book have given. (1) Formative Assessments: Assessment for learning, not an assessment of learning (2) An inspectorate (3) End-of-course examinations (4) Performance test, including project and portfolio defenses, begor judges. This was very interesting!!!! I also found the website for the book!!
Website for article from Washinton Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033100704.html

Website for the book: http://books.google.com/books?id=f7-eAAAAMAAJ&q=high+stakes+testing&dq=high+stakes+testing&pgis=1