Under new guidelines, students are supposed to spend less of 2 percent of their time taking standardized tests. But that still leaves time for plenty of testing.
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The president’s announcement also followed the release of a report last week from the Council of the Great City Schools, which found that students spend between 20 to 25 hours each school year on an average of eight assessments, including federal and state standardized tests. Standardized testing typically begins in early March, and examinations typically are administered in at least one classroom in the district each day until the school year is over at the end of May.
The president now says he wants less testing in schools. The Obama Administration also acknowledged its role in helping to increase the number of standardized tests.
Today, as a parent, I want to know how my child is doing in school, and I want my teacher to know that, too.
And let’s not forget how the partnership with schools and Google, as well as other high-tech firms, has led to the success our high school students in numerous robotic challenges.
While these major issues are being debated, a strategic change for enhancing the learning process is taking place at the ground level of small communities.
Obama’s 2 percent cap would equal about 21 hours of testing in Colorado, where legislation this year reduced the time spent on standardized tests by 26 percent.
“Limiting state testing would definitely give us teachers, especially like science classes, where we do hands-on activities, a lot more time that we can actually use with the students so that they can emphasize the values”, Gary DeLeon, a Lubbock science teacher, says. “There’s something going on most days”.
This headlong rush to change tests is why fewer Pennsylvania students scored “proficient” on the PSSAs this year.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan listens while President Obama makes a statement to the press after a meeting with the Council of the Great City Schools Leadership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 16, 2015.
“We start testing in March, and don’t stop testing until the end of May”, he said. It did not count quizzes or tests created by classroom teachers, and it did not address the amount of time schools devote to test preparation. Instead, we could be helping them mark how much progress they have made and encouraging them to strive higher. Civil rights advocates pushed back, arguing that tests are an important safeguard for struggling students because publicly reported test scores show the achievement gap between historically underserved students and their more affluent peers. However, that waiver runs out state-wide after the current school year.
The rest of the administration’s recommendations are equally amorphous-more flexibility to states, an executive encouragement to pare down testing, but no substantive policy shift. Details, we’re told, will be unveiled in January.
In its new guidance to states, the US Education Department tries to soften its emphasis on using test scores to evaluate teachers and urges states and local districts to cut down on redundant and low-quality tests.
Those distressing numbers were discovered in the course of a two-year study that also failed to find any correlation between testing time and student performance on reading and math. It turns out the primary benefit of the proliferation of testing has been to provide jobs for test developers. But, she went on, “In our efforts to get data we sometimes forget how quickly the tests can add up”. Her fifth-graders take the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test, school- and district-mandated benchmark assessments, and teacher-created unit assessments.
Florida’s school superintendents, supported by the Florida PTA and others, have called for the state to suspend school grades and other consequences pegged to scores on high-stakes tests – such as teacher evaluations – until the FSA provides demonstrably solid results. That is why we are establishing a commission of educators, students, parents and members of the public to develop a blueprint for an assessment system that makes sense. The Every Child bill, which was ratified with a 81-17 bipartisan vote, serves as the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
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“Everything students do in regards to their schooling can be viewed as assessment”, Olney said, reflecting that when he was a teacher, listening to student responses and analyzing their work was all part of assessing their learning and growth. If ESEA isn’t passed, the whole circus starts over again. Returning to a time when we were able to mask the uneven academic attainment of students of color, poor students, English learners and students with disabilities is not morally viable.
