In January, the Newtown Board of Education asked the state education department of Connecticut to exempt students in the district from the state tests, due to the trauma of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.
The state education department agreed, but needed to get permission from the U.S. Department of Education.
The U.S. Department of Education agreed, and now the Connecticut General Asembly must give its consent.
So much for local control.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Chicago has seen just as many tragic and traumatic gun deaths as Newtown. I think Chicago should also get a waiver from state tests. Ours just began this week, and the psych hospital where I work is filled with stories of stress and break-down related to the unfair pressure on kids. When will it end??
This is the first thing I thought of, obviously I am not the only one.
So the guy who said this is the final decider?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned Sunday that thousands of teachers around the country could lose their jobs as a result of the automatic across-the-board spending cuts slated to begin Friday, barring action by lawmakers.
“As many of 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs,” Duncan warned on CBS News’ “Face The Nation.” “There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices they can’t come back this fall.”
Duncan argued that there was virtually nothing he could do to shield essential education programs from the federal spending cuts, which are set to begin Friday, if lawmakers don’t act to avert them.
“We don’t have any ability with dumb cuts like this to figure out what the right thing to do is. It just means that a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need,” Duncan said.
Katie makes an excellent point. There are unreported events that happen every day in this country that are just as traumatic as Sandy Hook to the children involved. Where is their exemption? Why are they compelled to take a high-stakes test?
The admission of the USDOE that an event like Sandy Hook necessitates a waiver is also an admission that these tests are an intrusive burden on the lives of children.
I agree that they are an intrusive burden.
I disagree that the waiver is an admission of such.
The waiver merely states that something happened and
the children should be exempted because
they are not ready at this point to take the test.
And, yes, there are traumatic events everyday, although I can hardly imagine something as traumatic being common.
Still, your point is well taken — compulsion to take
high stakes tests (to meet voluntary national standards?)
is at odds with what is best for the child.
“And, yes, there are traumatic events everyday, although I can hardly imagine something as traumatic being common.”
What, are we comparing traumas here? Are you saying that living in a neighborhood where death happens practically weekly, if not daily, and kids are routinely in fear of their lives is somehow less traumatic than one mass-shooting event? I’m not even sure how you’d begin to compare the two. Or why you’d want to.
The point is that by exempting the Newtown kids, the DOE has admitted that factors outside the control of schools can impact kids’ readiness/ability to take standardized tests. Newtown isn’t the only trauma in the country.
I agree with you fully.
The General Assembly better get to it, then: CMT’s began two days ago.
We live in interesting times. A Democrat in the White House is turning education into a grand control scheme at the expense of state and local rights while corporate forces led by both left and right-wing business leaders battle to control the goods and services that will define the “education” industrial complex of the 21st century.
At the end of the day, there is no substitute for a motivated student and their thoughtful teacher/mentor dedicated to the mutual love of learning. No amount of central command and control by either side will change that simple but beautiful reality.
My modest dream is that every student has a mentor/teacher relationship. I guess that means hiring more teachers and firing or ousting the plutocrats that have taken over the White House and our government. Lessons learned.
Wow! l love your beautiful reality
and your modest dream.
It makes sense that those traumatized students at Newtown should be exempt from a useless test. While I did not think about this, I have no problem with an exemption.
What about the thousands of other studemts who are subjected to severe emotional and/or physical trauma on a daily basis? Can they be exempt so their schools will not loose money or rank?
These tests and policies were established by the Bush administration and the Repubicans. Now that everyone hates them, history is being re-written to blame Obama.
It’s still cold in NH, let me blame Obama for not doing more…….
What do you mean “history is being re-written to blame Obama”?
I blame Obama NOW.
My point exactly! These standardized tests were not his doing…but it feels better to blame OBAMA than Bush.
@Angela – RttT is NCLB on steroids. It is worse.
RttT IS from Obama. He must be one conflicted person – on one hand, in his speeches, he decries teachers teaching to the test and he vows to do away with the practice, yet he oversees RttT that directly holds teachers responsible for the testing outcomes of their individual students.
Angela, the lines are blurred between the Dems and Repub regarding education reform. Don’t be distracted by parties and who to blame – it is all bad and we just have to speak up despite going against whatever party we are connected to. And I agree, let’s exempt them all from the tests.
Diane, I am not attached to any particular party and I agree both parties stink. But I dislike it when blame is put on Obama for problems he inherited.
It seems people are generous with their fingers pointing blame at him but very stingy with giving him the credit he deserves.
Anyway, the topic was exemption from those dumb test that distinguishes the social classes more than the aptitude of students in a school.
Please excuse my error. I meant to address my reply to thenextlevel2000.
Obama not only inherited the “problem” but he enhanced it. Race to the Top is nothing more than a way to federally control the information that gets poured into a child’s head, and consequently extracted from it, and which will be fed into a longitudinal statewide database to be freely shared with the corporate participants who will benefit from the “modeling” they will do on it.
He is only continuing the work that reformers in both parties had in mind all along which is to garner the youngest, most vulnerable segment of our population to benefit financially and emotionally. I’m sorry your allegiance to Obama is clouding your judgement, and honestly, it is that sentiment that is perpetuating this disaster.
Race to the Top could have been more. Unfortunately, it may become an example of total WASTE and Entitlements to those states blessed with all that money. States, liike MA, etc., are just eating the money up with research based programs that are no different from those that came before.
Blaming one man for our policies is like blaming the mother of the Newtown Shooter (Murderer) for the tragedy…that makes no sense.
@Angela. Girl you’ve got a lot to learn, and you are in the right place to do it.
Economically, Obama is a neoliberal – he has operated with little deviation from George Bush. His economics is friendly towards the corporate, and he has done little for the poor.
Educationally, Obama will turn out to be the worst president EVER. He already it. RttT is a disaster.
Obama has not supported labor in Wisconsin or in Michigan where republican governors have demolished labor. Who would have ever believed MI would become a RTW state? Obama has remained cautiously quiet on the union front while fully supporting people like Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates.
You are very misinformed. Stick around this sight long enough, and you’ll figure things out.
I used to be a republican, until I began frequenting this site and seeing the evidence for myself.
In Connecticut, in order to accelerate the failure of weak public schools with “reforms” that are misdirected (i.e. they tackle teachers and not the tests) Governor Malloy has proposed removing the car tax on lower priced cars. To pander to emotions, he calls it relief for middle class. But we know better.
Who is hit the hardest? The cities with the most low income families because they have more inexpensive cars. And where are the most troubled schools? Those same towns. Here is a twist – school budgets will go up in order to meet the extremely cumbersome state a la federal mandates. So those towns with the greatest loss in car tax also have the greatest need in school budget due to federal mandates in education. Anyone who is a property owner – brace yourself! They HAVE to make up the money somewhere!
This plan to redistribute wealth now puts the burden more firmly on homeowners to subsidize failing school reforms and now town budgets to make up the car tax loss. The best thing is to get involved in the school budget process and the education in your town…stop allowing your children to be used as test taking tools to substantiate the fallacy of failing schools. The tests are failing the children!
We have to act now – if we can get parents to realize that standardized tests do NOTHING for students except to perpetuate bad policy, maybe parents would opt-out en masse!
I am relieved that the students of Newtown will not have to sit for these tests. Certainly, logic alone would indicate that the rest of the school year is best dedicated to helping children and teachers begin to come to terms with what has happened to them. No one reasonable would expect tests to be a valid indicator of either the students’ abilities or (especially) their teachers’ effectiveness.
However, I wonder whether the administrative hierarchy would have been so willing to grant a waiver in a school community with a different demographic. From personal experience I can tell you that in the week after the a murder of an eighth grade student here in Boston, his classmates had to take the state MCAS despite pleas from the school.
Considering what we know about violence in our cities, an additional, generally ignored, problem about testing is that kids are often worried silly about other things than their scores. But, hey – no excuses.
This is a window into what all local education decisions (excuse me… requests) will eventually have to go through. I hope Newtown will get a response before the end of the school year. In the meantime, Newtown’s teachers and children are dangling and in limbo about what, if, when and how to prepare for the unknown. The entire, crazy decision process is inflicting more pain and stress on this community. Let me guess, the CT legislature will eventually decide contingent upon what Newtown wants. I better order my math class pencils soon before this type of decision has to go to Mr. Duncan for his blessing.
It is a scary concept. The PTA’s should have made a statement that parents will NOT be sending children in to school for the standardized tests in light of what happened.
Parents need to OWN education again….the Federal Government has become an ogre that feeds on children’s data, and only the parents can starve the beast into submission before it’s too late.
Education Reform will succeed in it’s mission to destroy public education as we know it. In CT, it would totally go away if parents simply said NO – reforms based on forced test-taking, data collection for student success profiles, data collection on teachers, data collection and surveys galore! Can you imagine the money that could be directed back into the classroom!
How did we let this happen!
“The PTA’s should have made a statement that parents will NOT be sending children in to school for the standardized tests in light of what happened.”
Are PTA’s allowed to do that?