A few weeks ago, the Minnesota Department of Education released its MCA-II results, the standardized tests given to Minnesota students to test proficiency in core areas of curriculum.
This is generally the time that newspapers across the state dig through a seemingly endless sea of numbers, pull out the ones for their own school district and a few neighbors, and create a snazzy chart.
A snazzy, useless, pointless chart.
You see, the MCA-II test -- the successor of, you guessed it, the MCA test -- is just the latest in a long line of standardized tests that are anything but standardized. The standards seem to change every year. You can't compare this year's results with the last five years to get a feel for how a school is doing, because the tests were different.
We've had MCAs, the Profile of Learning, No Child Left Behind, Basic Skills Tests, and many other incarcerations of student testing, each trumpeted as a glorious improvement over the last. Of course, each time the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bath water, and we were told we couldn't compare apples to apples on the tests.
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Good newspaper reporting is all about providing context. Are your taxes going up more this year than last year? Are your taxes higher than your neighbor's? Are they higher than someone's in the next town over? Is crime rising or falling?
With these test scores, we simply can't provide that context. They're barely understandable or useful as a metric when you look at a single year, much less the moving target of a changing test. We could abdicate the responsibility to provide context and just regurgitate the scores, but if you're not able to glean anything useful from them, they'd just be wasting space in the paper.
Until we get a test that truly follows the same standard for a measurable period, there's no reason to pretend the results are in any way useful. Standardized tests are like the weather in Minnesota. If you don't like them, wait five minutes and they'll change.
Every time we get a new governor, a new president, a new party in power in Congress, or a new party in power in the Legislature, the rules all change and all of the old data gets tossed out.
And already, the state is gearing up for the (surprise!) MCA-III tests in 2011. But they're not fooling anyone. We're going to have a new president in 2009, and chances are very good that No Child Left Behind will be left behind for some bold new initiative. And the MCA-IIs will be left behind too, and there's probably someone in some office already thinking up the next acronym for that new test.
So we're not going to give you some chart that doesn't tell you anything useful about whether your kid gets a good education at your school. Instead, we'll do the hard work of telling the stories about teachers, programs, budgets -- successes and failures -- that will probably do more to answer the basic question you have about your school: is it a good school?
(If you really want the data, e-mail us at editorial@wadenapj.com and we'll send you either the entire state's spreadsheet, or one we've pared down to just the school districts in our area.)
