At 07:34 AM 1/24/01 -0600, Olsen, Chris wrote:
>Jay and All --
>
> As a high school teacher, I would like to make a plea to the educational
>measurement community and statisticians on this list: get involved in this
>national issue of accountability. I have argued for too many years that we
>need to construct a rational system of accountability, but there are few
>within the educational community who have the expertise to proceed in a
>meaningful way, nor have there been incentives to do so.
well, if george bush pushes for more testing for accountability ... across
the nation like in texas, then i suspect more WILL get into this debate ...
either voluntarily or, being forced into it for some reason or another
the major problem is not that the community of assessment folks ... can't
agree on some reasonable plan ... they ACTUALLY can (even while debating it
very strongly) ... the difficulty is that this is totally a POLITICAL ISSUE
... that is spawn in the wells of state legislatures ... and so too if
bush's plan moves forward, the wells of the us of a congress
it is very hard for those in some professional arena ... to make the kind
of technical dents in the pragmatics of the legislatures' thinking caps ...
so, while i sympathize with chris' plea ... this will be a very difficult
nut to crack ... particularly at the national level
clinton had a go at this ... and made no dent ... no maybe it was because
it was CLINTON doing the pushing that it got no where but, this will not be
an easy task ... and most likely, will be passed off to the states ... and
as we have seen in mass. ... lots of problems are bound to occur
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
