In this post, which arrived a few days ago as a comment, Ron Lapekas, a retired teacher, explains why standardized tests have no value or validity for many students:

“I am a retired teacher. I always thought the SBT’s (Stupid Bubble Tests) had little value for my East Los Angeles 99% Latino students for several reasons.

“First, vocabulary necessary both to understand the questions and the answer choices made any test results meaningless, even in math. If you don’t understand the question how can you evaluate the correctness of the answer?

“Second, we didn’t get the results until the end of summer. I never gave SBT’s to my students because, as I told them, I grade work, not answers. If a student doesn’t know which answers were incorrect, if there is no way to review how the answers were selected, and if there is no way to give feedback to…