High-Stakes Testing Coping With Collateral Damage [Paperback]

The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has thrust high-stakes testing - its goals, methods, and consequences - into the educational limelight. The four-fold purpose of this book is to: describe the nature of high-stakes testing; identify types of collateral damage that have attended the testing programs; analyze methods different groups of people have chosen for coping with the damage and suggest lessons to be learned from the high-stakes-testing experience.

The six groups of people whose coping strategies are inspected include: politicians and their staffs; educational administrators and their staffs; parents and the public; test makers and test administrators;  teachers and students. Importantly, the author avoids aligning himself with the test-bashing rhetoric of those who oppose high-stakes testing, especially the No Child Left Behind Act.

Key features of this outstanding new book include:

• illustrative cases. The book offers more than 350 cases of collateral damage from high-stakes testing--and people's coping strategies--as reported in newspapers over the 2002-2004 period.
• background perspectives. Part I examines the influence of high-stakes testing on: 1) what schools teach; 2) how student progress is evaluated; 3) how achievement standards are set; and 4) how test results are used.
• participant responses. Part II, which is the heart of the book, devotes a separate chapter to the coping strategies of each of the major participants in the high-stakes testing movement: politicians and their staffs, educational administrators and their staffs, parents and the public, test-makers and test-givers, teachers, and students.
• summary chapter. The last chapter (Lessons to Learn) offers suggestions for minimizing collateral damage by adopting alternative approaches not used in the creation of our current high-stakes testing programs, lc+