Who Holds the Test Writers Accountable?

It occurred to me the other day that while almost everyone in the political world and parenting world seems to be of the opinion that we should hold teachers accountable for the work that they do in the classroom, and quite a few people believe that this should be done through a series of standardized tests, no one seems to even be asking how we can hold the test writers accountable. When was the last time that they were asked to prove the validity of their tests? While we can't trust educated and talented people who have dedicated their lives to the art of teaching, we are supposed to trust blindly the corporate fat cats and their cronies who design and implement standardized tests.

This flies in the face of all logic. On the one hand, we have the classroom teacher. This is a person that we most likely know personally, (Here I'm assuming that the person wanting accountability is a parent.) We have talked with this person, we have entrusted our darling children to this person for 6 hours of every day, and we have monitored how our child has grown and matured in the time that she has been in this teacher's classroom. On the other hand, we have a nameless corporate entity. They have shown up for one week in April or May, made our child sit down in front of a test booklet or computer testing module, and subjected them to a series of disconnected questions. We do not know the names of the people who have written these questions and we will almost certainly never meet them. Yet if the teacher says one thing about our child and the test writers say another, it is the test writers whom we trust.

Even assuming that the test asks questions that can actually measure the educational achievements of our child, how can one week, or sometimes even only one day of our child's life be considered an adequate sample of their educational level. Oh, sure, when the kid fails he is given two more chances, but even then we can't really be sure, because there are far too many uncontrollable variables in these non-sterile testing environments. Further, no one with any real training in test taking psychology is doing any observing of our child while he is given this test that decides whether he is at the proper educational level.

I'm not saying that the tests in and of themselves are bad. I'm saying that we don't know that because nobody is even trying to check them out. Still, even assuming that they turned out to be good, they could only ever realistically be considered a small piece of the total amount of information we have on our child.

In Oregon, teachers are asked to have a Master's degree in education within seven years of the date that they begin teaching. This degree is very expensive and often very meaningful in the lives of those who earn them. The state does this because it says that it believes that a teacher must be properly trained before he can successfully pass on wisdom and knowledge to the next generation. Does it then seem odd to anyone else that the state has almost no confidence in this highly trained teacher's ability to do his job? There isn't even any kind of system in place to record and analyze the teacher's opinion about their students. They write report cards that get filed away somewhere, but no one other than the child's parents and maybe the principal will ever look at these. But schools spend countless man hours of both teacher and administrator time going over the scores from standardized testing.

I think that blows.