The Secret Document that Drives Standardized Testing

Richard P. Phelps, via a kind email:

n the excellent film The Insider, Jeffrey Wigand, an ex-tobacco company executive, faces a dilemma. In return for a severance package and the health insurance coverage it provides his family, he signs confidentiality agreements promising not to reveal the company's research effort to boost the addictive power of cigarettes. When it appears that he is preparing to speak to journalists anyway, tobacco company-contracted PR hacks assassinate Wigand's character in the national media, and local thugs threaten his family's safety. In the end, Wigand strikes the match that blows up tobacco industry deceit on CBS's Sixty Minutes televised investigative news program.

I was reminded of Wigand's story recently when a testing industry executive warned me not to reveal the specifics of a secret document currently being written--a document that, in my judgment, will effectively embed the findings of fraudulent, biased research in educational testing into US law. Among the several nasty effects should be an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars on millions of new and worse-than-worthless "audit tests". The number of tests administered to our elementary-secondary students could double in some areas, but the quality of the results available from all tests will deteriorate.

Though this document will profoundly affect all Americans, whether directly involved in education or not, you cannot see it before it is published in its final, legal form, as a fait accompli in early 2013. I and perhaps a few hundred other testing aficionados read an early draft in 2011 but, legally, we cannot show it to you. We all signed confidentiality agreements.

Education insiders are currently writing in secret what is arguably the single most influential document in US education and psychology. Last updated in 1999, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is being revised and, if on schedule, will be presented in its completed form to the public in early 2013. (The testing Standards should not be confused with more common, and far more public, content standards, a.k.a. curriculum).

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 7, 2012 4:29 AM
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