"The Debacle of Testing Literacy Ability"
As those who follow the education scene know well, literacy testing takes up a huge amount of time, effort and money. Tom Sticht, an international consultant in education, in reviewing the field has termed the situation "The Debacle of Testing Literacy Ability." He summarizes the state of affairs as follows:
"Despite extensive use of standardized tests by the 50 states, 30-year reading trend data show minimal if any improvement for 9-, 13-, or 17-year-old children since the early 1970s...Further, the testing of adult literacy in 1992 and again in 2003 shows little or no improvement in literacy at the lowest levels and a decline at the highest levels."
"To date, then, the great literacy testing debacle has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, threatened teachers and administrators, subjected children to hours of drill and practice in test taking rather than engaging in learning important content and skills, and cast aspersions on the literacy skills of America's workforce, thus advertising to the world that the U. S. workforce is incompetent. This cannot be good for the health and welfare of the nation or its international competitiveness in the global economy.
Even if we could get literacy testing right - which we have not done up to now - there is no way we can test ourselves out of the serious educational problems that afflict our K-12 and adult literacy education systems. There is a word for the obsessive repetition of utterly foolish, unreasonable, and failed practices: insanity."
If you would like to read his full statement, you can find it at http://ednews.org/articles/25499/1/The-great-literacy-testing-debacle-in-the-United-States/Page1.html
