“… no more than a number from a bathroom scale can give you a full assessment of your personal wellness, a test score cannot fully assess a student’s academic growth.”
Superintendent Mark R. Cross, Peru Elementary School District #124, Peru, Illinois
Without a doubt, one of the most honest, straight forward, understandable analogies about the usefulness of student growth test scores that I’ve ever seen. While a test score can tell us something about what a student knew or didn’t know on a given date and under given circumstances, it can tell us little or nothing about why the student knew or didn’t know. And there in rests the disconnect between student test scores and teacher evaluations. And test publishers understand this fact and caution against the use of test score data in making personnel or policy decisions.