Proof Points: 5 Questions for Harvard testing expert Dan Koretz

This is a weekly newsletter. Sign up for a free subscription, and invite a friend to subscribe.

View this email in your browser

A newsletter from The Hechinger Report

Share

Forward

Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
Click here to subscribe!

By Jill Barshay

Back in 2010, I went back to grad school to study statistics and one of my professors assigned Dan Koretz’s 2009 book, “Measuring Up.” It was an unexpectedly well-written and engaging book for a Harvard academic who is preoccupied with the quantitative details of measurement. I learned a ton about why the whole testing and accountability movement was doomed from the start. It partly influenced me to switch from business to education journalism. Last spring, I had heard that Koretz was planning to retire from Harvard and I wanted to interview him. The pandemic has given me time to go back to things that I meant to do long ago and this is one of them.

Read the column

Key Points

Test inflation persists despite 2019 education law that reduced the stakes for annual state tests.
Testing would more accurately reflect what students know if sample test questions weren’t so similar to actual test questions.
Koretz argues that teachers who run engaging classrooms should be rewarded more than teachers who drill students to produce high test scores. That controversial idea would prioritize human observers’ subjective judgments over objective assessments.

Lit Review

Koretz, D. (2008). Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Koretz, D. (2017). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.