How do Schools Gauge Student Success?

Simply stated, formal assessments are generally tests that have been designed for academic achievement comparison purposes. Informal assessments are designed to drive classroom instruction and assess individual student growth over time. Below you will find a fairly brief overview of the advantages and disadvantages of both types of assessments.
I just downloaded an ‘app’ on my IPOD for the police scanner. It is freezing rain out today and I have folks travelling on the roads. I discovered that the numbers the police use to describe situations are uniform throughout the country!
Language on standardized tests could never begin to attempt this type of uniformity. For example, in some parts of the country people describe, the area leading up to a house, as the “walk way.” In Maine they call it the “door yard.” Cultural vocabulary variances, throughout our country, build a strong case against formal standardized testing. Can you imagine a child in Maine reading about a “walk way”? What would they picture? How much would this impede their comprehension of the setting? How would a student taking the test in Florida visualize the setting called a “door yard”? These blatant differences in everyday spoken language are a huge detriment to standardized testing. Climate is another variable in which a standardized test cannot control. A student from Florida would have considerably more background knowledge as opposed to a Maine student while reading a passage on hurricanes. These are some of the disadvantages of formal assessments.
The advantages of formal assessments are, they are easy to score and they give a general overview of how students’ perform, when compared to other students. “On the positive side, standardized tests do provide immediate general data for educational policy makers. They serve as a reliable, uncomplicated, and efficient method for schools to gather information . . .” (Block, 2004).
Informal assessments are much more labor intensive, yet abundantly more fair. They generally involve assessing the student from where s/he started and their rate of learning over time. They do not compare a student to any other populace, including their own classmates. Unfortunately, this type of assessment has not evidenced any significant level of achievement on formal assessments. “Only slight improvements were seen on standardized tests {after using portfolios},” (“What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction”, 2004). Informal assessments lend themselves towards promoting student advancement in self motivation and self esteem, two extremely important areas leading students’ toward success in their academic careers.
There is always going to be a bottom and a top in achievement scores, No Child Left Behind, does not acknowledge this basic tenet. You may raise the bar at all points of the scale, however you cannot remove the fact that there will continue to be students at the bottom, top, and somewhere in between. FCAT (Florida Comprehension Achievement Test) and other tests used solely for the purpose of deciding whether a student is promoted or retained must make other countries wonder how smart the United States truly is. I, for one, am embarrassed and appalled by this use, and in another paper sometime, I know I could build a good case, for this use of these assessment results (for retention purposes) as being a form of child abuse!