I can see the points you are making in elementary schools with stable teacher cadres. In schools with high turnover from year to year, it is helpful for teachers to refer to test scores attained in prior years by students they are unfamiliar with. Same goes for students who are new to the school.

I also believe that a minimum amount of testing can be done at reasonable cost on all students. Doing so would remove the possibility of stigma falling to those students singled out for testing.

I find the following quote very important where PPS elementary schools that have been abandoned by teachers and families in favor of better performing schools are concerned: “administrators will say how it (testing) helps them get a handle on how kids in their school are doing and how successful they are being when in fact what the scores usually show is the socio-economic level of the kids in their school.”

What better recommendation for equity in PPS neighborhood schools is there than the low test scores and economic status in PPS schools that have been abandoned by teachers and motivated families.

Note, this doesn’t preclude teachers testing for specific purposes, just the massively expensive school-wide testing.

If you want to know if a kid can do fractions it is not hard to give them a little test to figure it out. And one writing assignment the teacher corrects with a student doing 100% of the work is enough to know how well a kid writes.

I think a lot of people don’t understand how important it is to many, many teachers and administrators to justify what they are doing (the testing). So teachers will say it helps them when usually all they have looked at is the general spread sheet for the students’ scores. And administrators will say how it helps them get a handle on how kids in their school are doing and how successful they are being when in fact what the scores usually show is the socio-economic level of the kids in their school — something they, of course, already know. There are many variations of this, but the one that I have outlined is certainly the most common.

Oregon is supposed to have Information Technology capable of keeping track of individual student as well as classroom performance on tests from year to year. Some educators say this information is particularly valuable in identifying students in need of extra help.

I would like to see better coordination between state and NCLB testing; adjustment of current standards for ESL and Spedial Ed students and recognition and agreement among all parties that a more reasonable goal for 2014 is for 80% of students to meet standards that suitably challenge all students.

In other words, let’s see if we can all get along and make something good come out of the money the feds are willing to spend on improving the delivery of public education services.