Kramer vs. WASL

WASL time also means WASL Editorial Time. They're often repetitive, but I really liked this take by Stephen Kramer:

Last year, for the first time in WASL history, teachers were prohibited from looking at any test questions or completed test booklets. Now teachers have no way of knowing what is on the test or how their students responded. As I monitored students taking the test last spring, I knew many of the things I'd seen in the past were happening again:

• Students inadvertently turning two pages in a test booklet, and missing all the questions on those pages.
  
  
• Good writers who were stumped, became discouraged and shut down because they couldn't quite figure out how to respond to the assigned writing prompt they had a full day to work on.
  
  
• Students whose hands were so tired by the afternoons on writing test days (there are two) that, when they were copying their final draft work into the test booklets, they purposely skipped entire paragraphs or pages of their first-draft writing.
  
  
• Students who became so disheartened, after repeated unsuccessful attempts to solve a particularly difficult math problem, that they gave up, lost confidence and randomly marked answers to the rest of the questions in the section.
  
  
• Students who struggled for so long on a couple of particularly confusing math or reading questions that, when they read a "no-brainer" question, they were convinced that they were being tricked -- and skipped over the obviously correct answer because they didn't think it could possibly be right.

This idea of not being able to look at the test your kids just took is stupid beyond words; what manager worth his salt doesn't check what's being produced on his watch? Kramer has written previously about his experiences giving the WASL before; I'd be curious to hear his take on what a useful testing system would look like.