The guidelines come after years of complaints from teachers, parents and students.
Advertisement
Think your child spends too much time in the classroom taking tests?
MARTIN: Students should only spend 2 percent of their entire classroom time on tests?
The tests became mandatory starting in third grade under the No Child Left Behind law. I’ve heard from teachers who feel so much pressure to teach to a test that it takes the joy out of teaching and learning, both for them and for the students. But they’re going to keep annual testing in math and reading. Obama said the best teachers taught him to believe in himself, to be curious about the world and to inspire him to be a lifelong learner. He said he wanted that for all young people.
A state task force appointed by Gov. Chris Christie was charged with looking at the amount of testing that takes place in New Jersey public schools, with an eye on trying to eliminate duplication of local and state testing. Drill-and-kill is known as focusing student learning on specific knowledge or skills for the goal of optimizing test grades.
President Obama and the federal Department of Education are calling on states to cut back on standardized tests in schools.
Obama also said schools should look at more than just test scores when evaluating a student’s performance. Casserly said, for example, that the Boston Public Schools has made a decision to reduce its testing by half in response to the study’s findings.
Missouri Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven noted in a teleconference last week that 98.5 percent of schools in the state scored at the full-accreditation level. The lack of timely results means teachers begin a new school year not knowing where a student needs to improve. A just-released survey by the Council of Great City Schools found that also contributing to the “burden of testing” is a laundry list of formative, benchmark, diagnostic, and practice tests required at the state and district level.
The DOE said teachers and students have faced too much instructional time and undue stress from increasing testing demands, and that unnecessary testing “and not enough clarity of purpose” was involved in assessing students. “This is something the president and I have talked about, and it will be a key priority for me in our work with states and districts over the next 14 months”, said John King, who is slated to succeed Education Secretary Arne Duncan in January, according to The Washington Post. “I embrace the principles laid out today by the Obama administration because they move us in the right direction”. But their superintendent set out to find out how many tests the kids are taking. The alignment won’t fully occur until 2017.
Despite the rigorous testing in schools, Kansas faced the same concerns. The changes here that are being proposed are really about overall tweaks to state testing programs, cutting back on testing, auditing testing and that kind of thing. In addition to these federal requirements, states have enacted dozens of their own tests to measure achievement in additional grades or to cover subjects such as social studies. But federal financial incentives are geared to get states to adopt it. There is a very sharp contrast in countries that outperform United States in the global exam test thrice in their school years, reported Trib Live.
Advertisement
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) said in a statement that the administration’s ideas ultimately won’t do much to curb testing. That figure doesn’t include the amount of time kids and teachers spend preparing or taking practice exams.
