Gregory Cizek, the Guy B. Phillips Distinguished Professor of Educational Measurement and Evaluation, has taken on critics of K-12 testing in New York state in a column published in the New York Daily News.
Cizek, who recently served as president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, pans criticisms of work being done to establish a testing regime in New York, including taking on education historian and writer Diane Ravitch.
“Large testing contractors appear to get hammered regularly in the New York press for, essentially, being large,” Cizek wrote. “Well, when a task is large and has large consequences for students and the state’s education system, large is good. For my next flight, I’d prefer a plane made by Airbus or Boeing, not Ed’s Economy Aircraft Construction Co.”
In the column, Cizek rebuts criticisms of the establishment of cut scores and the use of a standard-setting procedure called “equating.”
He writes: “Although all testing can be improved, the truth is that the standardized achievement assessment students take in New York are unquestionably the most accurate, least biased, time and cost-efficient tests that they will see all year.”
The column is available here.