States' Standards, Tests Are a Mismatch, Study Finds

Half of the more than 800 high-stakes state tests given to satisfy the No Child Left Behind Act don’t appear to line up with the states’ academic standards, raising basic questions about using such assessments to judge schools, students, or teachers, argues a report released today by the American Federation of Teachers.

The policy brief was released by the 1.3 million-member union July 20 at the start of its biennial convention in Boston.

One aspect of the problem, the report says, is the quality of the standards themselves. Another is the mismatch between states’ expectations for students—the academic standards—and the content of the tests. For a state’s NCLB-mandated testing regime to qualify as “smart,” the standards had to be clear and explicit, and the tests had to sample proportionately from them,...