The Paradoxes of High Stakes Testing: How They Affect Students, Their Parents, Teachers, Principals, Schools, and Society

The book's goal is to clarify for parents, the public, and policy makers what high stakes tests are and how their use affects our schools, children, and society. It explores the various uses, limitations, and paradoxical consequences of high stakes testing. The present context of testing and the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind make the proposed book timely and important. Current testing programs provide valuable information to teachers, parents, and policy-makers about students, schools, and school systems. But paradoxically, these programs have unintended yet predictable negative consequences for many students, teachers, and schools. It is essential that the public and policy-makers understand the scope and impacts that result from the inherent paradoxical nature of high-stakes testing. Testing is viewed by policy makers across party lines as an "objective" measure of student attainment and has become their tool of choice to drive educational "reform" and hold children, teachers, schools, and districts accountable. Bipartisan support for test-based accountability is firm. For example, on January of 2005 President Bush called on Congress to extend NCLB testing in math and science to freshmen, sophomores and juniors citing poor performance among high school students as a "warning and a call to action." (NYT 01/ 13/05) Senator Kennedy, a critic of the President, nonetheless supported the President's proposed high school testing provisions.

Michael Russell is Associate Professor of Education at Boston College s Lynch School of Education where he directs the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative. His research and teaching interests lay at the intersection of assessment and technology. He teaches classroom assessment for pre-service students and courses that focus on issues in testing, assessment, and evaluation to graduate students. He has conducted several studies that focus on the use of computer-based technologies to increase test validity. These research issues include computers and writing, computer-based test accommodations for students with special needs, developing diagnostic tests for teachers to use in the classroom, and improving the instructional utility of large-scale tests. He is author of Technology and Assessment: the Tale of Two Interpretations.