Books: Excerpts

Ruth Mitchell, the associate director of the Council for Basic Education, writes in Testing for Learning that "a new model of schooling is a national imperative." One aspect of the model she envisions will be standards whose achievement can be verified by assessment practices going beyond multiple-choice.

In arguing for the rapid implementation of performance-based testing, Ms. Mitchell underscores its benefits and reliability, but admits that it is an unknown quantity in some areas. In the excerpt below, she discusses its cost:

No one knows accurately how much performance assessments cost, partly because there is no accurate information about how much any form of educational assessment costs. When school-district or state personnel put a dollar figure on evaluation, they may be counting only the cost of buying the test from the publisher, complete with reported results. The district or state education office typically will not include the costs of the testing-and-evaluation office maintained (in big school districts and in state departments of education) to oversee the administration of the tests or the time administrators spend with test salespeople and, later, their own colleagues to decide on a test. Nor will they include the teachers' time spent preparing students for the test--time that, on the admission of many teachers, is not spent "teaching" in the...