Testing time will be cut by as much as half in a few subject areas and grade levels.
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Providing context for that recommendation was a study of 66 big-city public school districts released October 24 by the Council of Great City Schools, which bills itself as “The Nation’s Voice for Urban Education”.
Schools will also have more flexibility when it comes to how they administer the tests, whether that be in one entire day or over of several days. It also did not include regular day-to-day classroom quizzes and tests in reading, math, science, foreign languages and more.
Thanks to new mandates as part of the Common Core/No Child Left Behind legislation, our kids are tested-a lot.
Regis Catholic Schools have been using this model for years.
Both Obama and Cuomo have embraced the education reform movement that supports using standardized tests to evaluate teachers and schools, and have worked to carry out that agenda.
“Learning is about so much more than filling in the right bubble”, Mr. Obama said.
To drive the point home, Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan met in the Oval Office on Monday with teachers and school officials working to reduce testing time.
Still, the White House provides a bully pulpit and Obama’s remarks – made in a video posted October. 24 on Facebook – add to the national debate about the pros and cons of high-stakes testing.
“It generally lacks any strategy or theory of action behind how it is defined”, said the Council’s Executive Director Michael Casserly.
“Having states and school districts jointly reviewing redundancy and overlap in their testing requirements will be an important step in reducing unnecessary assessments”, he said.
“Cause we just had so many of them”, he said.
“Everyone has had a hand” in the proliferation of tests, he said – from Congress to the U.S. Department of Education, state education departments, test vendors and school districts.
“Children in this state are absolutely being over-tested”, she said.
But the statewide CMAS tests will consume only a low of 8.25 hours in third grade to a high of about 13 hours in seventh and eighth grades next spring, according to CDE.
And that heavy focus on test scores has led many parents and teachers to revolt against the testing.
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“It was getting to be a little too much, so the state made a decision to transition from PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) testing to AIR (American Institutes for Research) testing, which is a different company”. “That teachers feel like they don’t have time to teach what they need to teach in order to have students do well on the tests”.
