Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us

by Daniel Koretz

To expect mildly retarded students to outperform the entire bottom third of students in the highest-scoring countries in the world, and to expect this to happen in twelve years, no less, is remarkably naive. I have no doubt that the motivation for this mandate is good, an attempt to force schools to attend more to the achievement of students with disabilities. This stands in contrast to earlier federal requirements that focused primarily on procedural issues, such as the appropriate classroom placements for students. Nonetheless, as a former special education teacher, I consider the extremity of the requirements unfair to teachers and cruel to students, because it forces them to take tests on which they cannot be successful and to be labeled as failures even if they are working well relative to their capabilities.