Measuring Up

Scores on high-stakes tests—tests that have serious consequences for students or teachers—often become severely inflated. That is, gains in scores on these tests are often far larger than true gains in students’ learning. Worse, this inflation is highly variable and unpredictable, so one cannot tell which school’s scores are inflated and which are legitimate. (p. 131) Thus, Koretz, a long-time associate of the federally funded Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST), provides the many educators predisposed to dislike high-stakes tests anyway a seemingly scientific (and seemingly not self-serving or ideological) argument for opposing them. Meanwhile, he provides policymakers a conundrum: if scores on high-stakes tests improve, likely they are meaningless—leaving them no external measure for school improvement. So they might just as well do nothing as bother doing anything. Measuring Up supports this theory by ridiculing straw men— declaring a pittance of flawed supporting evidence sufficient (pp. 11, 59, 63, 132, and chapter 10) and a superabundance of contrary evidence nonexistent—and mostly by repeatedly insisting that he is right. (See, for example, chapter 1, pp. 131–133, and pp. 231–236.) He also shows 2