The State Department of Education flunked another set of writing tests taken by fifth- and eighth-grade students.
Deemed too unreliable to count, this is the second year Oklahoma state writing tests were discarded. Even after a change in test vendors, test results showed grades too high from poor students and too low from good students. (Though, we’re guessing, if all the tests were “too high,” they’d go ahead and keep them.)
And, as the Legislature hasn’t officially addressed the issue, we should probably expect more tests to be thrown out next year.
Look, nobody wants kids to fail a reading test, but at some point, the state has to live with the results of the tests it gives unless it wants the parents who care about their children’s educations to be reading “Now Leaving Oklahoma” as they pack up and head to another state.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2015.