I Personally Believe

I disagree fundamentally with the premise behind Nitko and Brookhart's responsibilities for teachers regarding assessment. They write that teachers have legal, ethical, and moral responsibilities in 6 areas concerning assessment. I believe that a teacher's responsibilites are to TRY and meet those 6 areas of responsibilities. The best course of action can differ from the ideal when actually meeting one of those responsibilites is detrimental to the students, the school district and the educator themself.

Three of the responsibilites that I believe educators cannot and should not always meet are crafting assessment procedures, chosing assessment procedures, and communicating assessment procedures. I will use the NYS Regents Exams as an example, but I know that there are a vareity of other similar exams at other grade levels and in other states. Individual educators cannot always have a large impact on crafting and choosing assessment items for the NYS Regents Exam in their content area. For example, I believe that the last few Living Environment exams have placed far too much emphasis on genetics as compared to the emphasis placed on genetics by the mandated curriculum. I could choose to give a modified Regents exam in my classroom for a vareity of reasons, but doing so would be harmful to the students, endanger my job, and look bad for the school district. I also have very little control of how the assessment results are communicated. I would like the assessment results to include data on strengths and weaknesses of individual students and the class in general, but I have no control over that. Again, trying to meet this responsibility would be detrimental to all involved.

I agree with the other responsibilites that the authors wrote about. Teachers always have responsibilites for how they administer an assessment, score it, and interpret the results. To continue with the NYS Regents example, teachers can have an impact in these categories. For example, an individual educator can keep the Regents in mind when developing IEPs and make sure that they include appropraite modifications and accomidations. An individual educator also has control over how they interpret and use assessment results. For example, an educator may recieve praise from their supervisors for an overall imporvement in student scores from one year to the next. Rather than accepting this interpretation of the data, that educator can examine the exam itself and reflect on the individual students to determine the true reason for the increased scores. An easier exam does not correspond to better instruction, and educators do have a responsibility to recognize that.

I also believe that educators do not have a legal responsibility to meet all of these responsibilites. Their legal responsibility is be able to prove that they tried to meet these responsibilites, regardless of what they actually did or did not do. For example, consider the situation referecnced in Professor Browne's blog post. These educators met their legal obligation by meeting with the press and trying to explain their results. When individuals misuse and misinterpret their results later on, it is not the researchers' fault. They did what they could be reasonably expected to in order to prevent misinterpretation, and they can prove that they did so. If the founders of Facebook tried to sue them for slandering Facebook, they can prove that they never did anything of the sort and furthermore took actions to prevent it from occuring. Their legal responsibilites have been met.

I believe that teachers have the ethical and moral responsibility to try their best in terms of assessment, but sometimes their actions need to be restricted in the best interests of the students, school district, and themselves. Legallly, their only obligation is to be able to prove that they tried to do what is right. I believe that the book gave a good overview of teachers' responsibilities regarding assessment, but that the situation is often more grey than the black-and-white situation they present. Our education system is complicated, and every situation calls for an educator's best professional judgement.