FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing FairTest is an advocacy organization working to end the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized testing and ensure that evaluation of students and workers is fair, open, and educationally sound. They emphasize eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests, and preventing their damage to the quality of education. This site provides information, technical assistance and advocacy on a broad range of testing concerns, focusing on three areas: K-12, university admissions and employment tests (including teacher testing).
Rouge Forum. A group of educators working for democratic schooling, the Rouge Forum has particularly taken on concerns with governmentally imposed standardization of knowledge and standardized tests. This site is filled with information, critique, and resources useful in providing alternative viewpoints.
Alfie
Kohn: Rescuing our schools from "tougher standards".
Alfie Kohn has been a most visible proponent of effective education
for students (See The Schools Our Children Deserve, What to Look
for in a Classroom, and No Contest). Likewise, he has been most
visible in the struggle against the harm being imposed by the
standards movement and standardized tests, an approach summarized
by the cartoon below taken from his website (See The Case Against
Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining our Schools).
This site has short articles regarding the problems with the standards
movement and standardized tests, links to additional resources
including a national network of coordinators in each state.
Northwest
Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL)
101 SW Main, Ste. 500,
Portland, OR 97204
This site provides examples of useful assessments that are directly
linked to instruction, providing teachers, students, and parent's
ongoing authentic assessment information that helps students learn
and teachers teach.
North
Central Regional Educational Laboratory
1120 East Diehl Road, Suite 200
Naperville, Illinois 60563
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/as0cont.htm
This site provides information and links regarding ways to link
assessment to effective learning and teaching in meaningful ways,
strategies for assuring equity in the assessment process, particularly
concerned with issues of race and class. On this site, we would
particularly recommend the following article: Why
Should Assessment be based on a Vision of Learning? M. Kulieke,
J. Bakker, C. Collins, T. Fennimore, C. Fine, J. Herman, B.F.
Jones, L. Raack, M.B. Tinzmann
NCREL, Oak Brook, 1990.
K-12 Standards:
MCREL
2550 S. Parker Road, Suite 500
Aurora, CO 80014
This site provides comprehensive descriptions and links to standards
and benchmarks established for various disciplines across grade
levels. Briefly peruse this list across a couple of subjects.
Go to the standards list for two subjects for second graders.
Think how you might feel if you were required to effectively respond
to these standards to keep your present job. Similar standards
statements are finding their way into the standards documents
of states all over the country, representing impossible and potentially
undesirable technical knowledge on the part of children. These
standards statements are significant for what they include. Perhaps
they are the most significant for what they exclude. Go to the
section on civics, for example, and try to find examples regarding
how grassroots organizations, such as those who headed the civil
rights movement in the 1960's, developed political impact. Or
look for standards that talk about building emotional health or
the capacity to care for other human beings, to develop a sense
of character. We have to remember that standards have presently
been driven by the coalition of the technical needs of corporations
and the perceptions of what academics think the world should know
about their subjects. To date, minimal to no conversations have
been held broadly with parents, community members and organizations,
and children themselves regarding what they think the goals of
learning should be.
National Center
for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing
UCLA, GSE&IS Building, Mailbox 951522
300 Charles E. Young Drive North
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1522
http://cresst96.cse.ucla.edu/index.htm
At this site you can read much research that is organized around
the central themes assessment should be driven by the standards
described in the MCREL site above. What's missing in much of this
research is a questioning of the real goals of learning.