Latest link update at
the end of the article is October 29, 2015
On October 24, 2015 the Obama administration announced a
shift of its education policy when it announced a change in the Department of
Education’s position on standardized testing. As reported
by
Kate Zernike in The New York Times,
Specifically, the administration called for a cap on
assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom
instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing”
as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public
elementary and secondary schools.
This
is being promoted in the corporate media as a dramatic shift in the Obama
administrations support for standardized testing. It should be greeted with a high degree of skepticism
and caution,
however. The over two-decade siege on public education codified into education
policy by No Child Left Behind followed by Race to the Top is not going to
suddenly be scaled down in one day. There are too many corporate interests,
such as Pearson, the Gates Foundation and others, which have made
standardized testing the center of their method of privatizing public
education, for the corporate agenda to be given up.
The average student in America’s big-city public schools
will take roughly 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and
high school graduation, a new study shows.
The average of roughly eight standardized tests per year
consumes between 20 and 25 hours each school year and frequently produces
overlapping results. There were about 401 test titles being used in the
nation’s largest urban school systems in the 2014-15 school year and students
sat over 6,500 times for tests across the 66 school systems studies, the
research found.
The two year study, believed to be the most
comprehensive ever undertaken to ascertain the true extent of mandatory testing
in the nation’s schools, was conducted by the Council of Great City Schools at the request of its board
of directors, which wanted a full picture of the testing practices in its
big-city school systems. The Council’s board requested the inventory in 2013 to
better inform the public debate and to shape needed reforms.
The
Council of Great City Schools met with Obama on March 16, 2015. In its press release the Obama administration
gave an outline of the policy which it announced October 24, 2015.
The October
24th announcement comes at a time when a bipartisan Congressional
conference committee is trying to come up with a revision of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act. The rewrite is getting lost in the chaos on Capitol
Hill and this must be factored in as the reason for this announcement now. The
Republicans would like a bill that would implement competency-based learning
and online education based on an ALEC-inspired return to state
control of education.
The Democrats, on the other hand, had been promoting an increase in
standardized testing as a continuation of the neoliberal education
agenda
started by President Bill Clinton, and disguised as the next
civil rights issue.
In
its press release, the Council of Great City Schools concludes,
The Council released preliminary recommendations with the
report that call for retaining current annual tests in core subjects but
eliminating tests that are either redundant or low quality.
In addition, the Council announced that it will launch a
commission of researchers, school leaders, teachers and parents to develop “a
more thoughtful approach to assessing the academic needs of urban
schoolchildren.” Casserly indicated that commission chairs would be named in
the next two weeks.
Since
the Obama administration is responding to the Council’s report (and it may be
coordinating this report to promote its agenda), this must be carefully watched
to see if the Council is taking an independent stand in defense of public schools
or if this is a fine-tuning of the neoliberal agenda for privatizing public
schools. Who they put on the commission they are forming will tell us a lot
about the course they and the Obama administration are taking.
If, according to the Council of great city Schools, the
average amount of time devoted to taking mandated tests during the 2014-15
school year was 2.34 percent of school time for the average 8th grader—the
grade with the most mandated testing time, what indeed is the Pres offering? A
real reduction of .34%?
A real reduction of .34 percent? Seriously?
Two
percent is 20 hours of instruction time given to standardized testing.
As
always, the corporate media plays a crucial role in framing people’s perception
of these developments. The New York Times article announcing the changes in the
Obama administrations policy on standardized testing is a case in point. Nowhere
in the article is the growing Opt Out movement mentioned as a factor. Nowhere
to be found are teachers, or the huge education blogging community that has
been at the forefront of opposition to corporate education reform, or
university professors who have been increasingly speaking out about
market-driven education policies.
There’s plenty of agreement that there’s too much testing
going on.” But, he added, “we have to be careful, as with anything federal,
that it doesn’t lead to unintended consequences.
The
biggest mischaracterization of the “mounting bipartisan opposition to increased
and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s schools” in the New York Times
article, however, is the nature of the opposition to standardized testing. The
reporter says,
Teachers’ unions, which had led the opposition on the left
to the amount of testing, declared the reversal of sorts a victory. “Parents,
students, educators, your voice matters and was heard,” said Randi Weingarten,
the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
This
is corporate media spin of the nature of the grassroots opposition to
standardized testing and Common Core. This opposition is not coming from the
leadership
of the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association. Though
Randi Weingarten makes milk-toast statements about standardized testing and Common Core to
play her role as spokeswoman for teachers for the corporate media, behind the scenes
her role is quite different. Far from being “left”, she collaborates with the
right-wing, anti-public education American Enterprise Institute and promotes
the Gates and Broad agenda of corporate education reform. See these posts on Defend Public Education! for detailed reporting on how she has been collaborating
with these interests to promote standardized testing and using those tests for
teacher evaluation.
There
can be no doubt that it is the grassroots opposition to standardized testing
and Common Core that has led to this change of tactics on standardized testing
by the Obama administration. Hundreds of parent organizations in schools across
the country have been garnering increasing support for opting out of standardized
tests and for a return to community control of schools. Rank-and-file teachers
through such organizations as United Opt Out and BATs, have been organizing
independently to fight the disastrous impact of corporate education reform.
We
must be abolitionists when it comes to standardized testing. There can be no
more talk about “reducing the amount of testing.” The Obama administration has
adopted this characterization by some of the opponents of corporate education
reform to defuse the Opt Out movement. It is promoting the same corporate
agenda it always has.
Standardized
testing is NOT to the benefit of students, parents, or teachers. They get no
information from standardized tests that is useful to the student in improving
their education. The students and teachers never see what students got right or
wrong on a test and what should be remediated in their education. The sole
purpose of corporate standardized tests is to rank students and schools in
order to advance a privatization of public schools agenda.
Also
see:
“Mike
Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has gone so far as to call the new NAEP
scores “heartbreak”.
“Test refusal is refusing
racial profiling and saying yes to dignity and anti-racist, humanizing
schooling.”
