Lily Eskelsen Garcia speaks out. Time to stop toxic testing!
CORRECTED version
http://www.nea.org/home/60750.htm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 16, 2014
CONTACT: Staci Maiers, NEA Communications
202-270-5333 cell, smaiers@nea.org
NEA: STANDARDIZED TESTING MANIA HURTS STUDENTS, DOES NOTHING TO CLOSE GAPS
*** ‘Brave solution from federal government’ still needed to diminish volume, misuse of toxic tests ***
WASHINGTON—The National Education Association, the nation’s largest union with 3 million educators, has been sounding the alarm on the toxicity of the standardized testing mania that has been hijacking America’s schools. Recent statements by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools and today’s report from Center for American Progress have confirmed that too often and in too many places, the education system has turned into a system of teach, learn and test with a focus on punishments and prizes.
The following statement can be attributed to NEA President Lily Eskelsen García:
“We commend the CCSSO and CGCS for taking a much needed first step to address the sources of over-testing that stem from state and local tests. But in order to reduce the over-use and abuse of standardized tests, we still need a brave solution from the federal government—such as a return to grade span testing. The sheer volume of tests and test prep that students must endure because of over-testing in America’s schools takes away from students’ time to learn and does nothing to close opportunity gaps.
“As educators, we support testing as a way to guide instruction for our students and tailor lessons to their individual needs. When students spend increasing amounts of class time preparing for and taking state and federally mandated standardized tests, we know the system is broken. As experts in educational practice, we know that the current system of standardized tests does not provide educators or students with the feedback or accountability any of us need to promote the success and learning of students. It also doesn’t address the main issues that plague our education system, like ensuring equity and opportunity for all students.
“School is where childhood happens. Even if Civil War dates are forgotten and geometry becomes a blur, one lesson must stick: the love of learning. No bubble test can measure how a kid feels; no standard replaces figuring out how to get along with others. So much happens at school that shapes our children’s tomorrows, including the security, acceptance and joy they feel today.
“Parents don’t want their children to be treated with a one-size-fits-all education approach. And educators know that students are more than a test score, so let educators teach and put an end the toxic practice of punishing students, schools and educators based on test results.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is one more useless proclamation from our sellout unions. It is the same as the Weingarten mantra. Let’s pretend to address the testing issue while ignoring the Common Core issue. There is no hope for this so called leadership.
She should demand that Congress eliminate the use of standardized tests to punish students, teachers, administrators, and school by re-writing and re-authorizing the NCLB act. This is the only true, meaningful solution.
NY Teacher,
How do you propose they rewrite NCLB? I would recommend they scrap it. The only part worth saving is the highly qualified teacher provisions, which are largely ignored in my district nowadays.
You’re not kidding. Highly qualified means pretty much nothing when a district wants ignore it. TFA had legislation written that gives its scabs HQ status. Amazing.
When one applies via Applitrack, all the bells and whistle boxes must be checked, with documents uploaded to prove it–then it disappears into a big black hole, and uncertified, unqualified, inexperienced, under-prepared TFAs get the jobs, while credentialed novices get ignored and, worse, veteran teachers get fired. Still, the reformers love it, even when these strategies prove contradictory and they get caught red-handed. Up is down; down is up.
Wikipedia:
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and has been the most far-reaching federal legislation affecting education ever passed by Congress. The act is an extensive statute that funds primary and secondary education, while explicitly forbidding the establishment of a national curriculum.] It also emphasizes equal access to education and establishes high standards and accountability. In addition, the bill aims to shorten the achievement gaps between students by providing each child with fair and equal opportunities to achieve an exceptional education. As mandated in the act, the funds are authorized for professional development, instructional materials, for resources to support educational programs, and for parental involvement promotion. The act was originally authorized through 1965; however, the government has reauthorized the act every five years since its enactment. The current reauthorization of ESEA is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, named and proposed by President George W. Bush. The ESEA also allows military recruiters access to 11th and 12th grade students’ names, addresses, and telephone listings when requested.
It existed for 35 years without punitive, high-stakes testing. It took the tag-team combo of Kennedy and Bush to pull that off.
a focus on punishments and prizes??? what prizes? someone is getting prizes in all of this nonsense? until the billionaires, and their bought positions in education, and their phony non-profits, and the entire machine that is them, get out of of education, there will just be more of this.
Parents are waking up. STUDENTS are standing up for themselves (and I thought my daughter’s generation was really something) well, these kids are getting it right and fighting back.
anyhow, it isn’t the tests, the toxic tests, its the ruse, the smoke and mirrors….maybe there will be a fresh, new dead body for the billionaire vultures to eat and they will move out of education
NJ Teacher et al,
I dont’ know who Lily really is at this point. Time will tell. But what I am not understanding is how you guys compare her to Weingarten, and that Lily is disingenuous.
Read the last paragraph:
“Parents don’t want their children to be treated with a one-size-fits-all education approach. And educators know that students are more than a test score, so let educators teach and put an end the toxic practice of punishing students, schools and educators based on test results.”
Maybe I am being naive?
NY Teacher, care to comment?
I for one do not believe in using test scores as a way to measure excellence in teaching. The teaching and learning process is not an “if-then” statement when it comes to scores. Our focus must be on reducing poverty in society while improving teacher education and excellence in teaching. We do that by supporting professionals and not punishing them with high stakes testing. Yet what that “support” looks and feels like also depends on the community, administration, unions, and faculty coming together and coming to consensus.
We must also fight for far more federal funding (our feds finance 13% of public school budgets while other modern countries on average have federal governments that fund 54% of their public school spending.
Less money should be spent on war and tax relief for the wealthy and more on public and social infrastructure . . .
If we don’t demand this, we will turn into the type of society depicted in the 2013 film “Elysium” . . . . . .
She is saying some of the right things. But a real leader doesn’t just talk. A real leader solves problems with action. She has the weight and power of 3 million educators to leverage the politicians with. It’s way too soon to be calling her another Weingarten.
Not really sure what she means with this??????????
“We commend the CCSSO and CGCS for taking a much needed first step to address the sources of over-testing that stem from state and local tests.”
I do know that all of this testing is hurting our students and taking precious time from instruction. My middle school students had to take pre-tests, post-tests for the measure of student learning in every subject so that the teachers and myself could be evaluated and that was in every subject. Then they had to take the ELA and Math tests which took 3 days each and then I had to send out 4 teachers for 5 days each, yes 5 teachers for each test each day to grade these tests. You know how hard it is to get 5 subs in one day for 10 days at a minimum. Then the 8th grade had to take the Science test which has to be set up and has 2 parts, hands on and written. Then the regents classes had to take 2 math tests the new CCLS Math test and the old math test including the Science regents and Social Studies Regents. The ELL students also had to take a test which has different parts, listening, reading and writing. A whole team had to be deployed to deal with this, including a full time teacher used to keep all of this flowing correctly and meeting all compliance. In addition we were chosen to field test, had to give the students the tripod survey which they could care less about filling out especially when they had to fill it out, 99 questions I believe for every teacher they have and the learning environment survey. This does not include teacher created assessment which is needed to drive instruction. All I can say is that the students were “tested out”, I had never seen anything so ridiculous in my life. It made me glad that my children were not in school anymore. I did notice that the testing companies were making a lot of money as the measure of student learning tests have to be paid for and grading of all these tests uses teachers time and costs schools money for subs when you can get them. And what does all this testing tell us, nothing we don’t know already, but I have calculated that between all the testing and all the time used to provide subs for our students, an easy 20 days is wasted. Yes, 20 instructional days at the minimum. This is a travesty.
8th graders in my school must put up with 40 days for a combination of state, benchmark, and local exams related to APPR evaluations. it is a nightmare for sped accommodations and turns tests into nothing but white noise. Include time wasted in test-prep and EnrageNY modules crap – and in two short years we have transformed our 3 to 8 programs into brain deadening exercises. Chasing our own tails, wasting taxpayer money, and producing failure rates that hover around 80+%. If we stay this course, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. We can comply or we can defy. Thye choice is ours.
I agree, but unfortunately too many people comply and do not defy. The choice is our but people are afraid to stand up. I can understand, I stood up and lost a lot.
Early and mid-career teachers are right to be afraid. That must change. Operating out of fear is a lose-lose proposition. Veteran teachers must take the lead. The loss of union support has made defiance a difficult personal decision for many.
To me, there has been a societal shift in determining that which has value, educationally as well as in the job.market. In most spheres, the job market is focusing on this “efficiency” farce that can only be achieved through replacing workers with computers and other technologies. When those break down and don’t work, productivity is at a standstill. So, they value workers who can troubleshoot or patch the problem to bring back that “faster than human” tech delivery.
Schools are being sucked into this false efficiency system, expecting all differences to be made equal by this injection if “non-biased” yet man-made set of data points.
I am retired and now subbing in that same district. I am seeing the students who were doing well without excessive computer usage struggling because they aren’t techie types. I am seeing the loners and those on the spectrum finding a place to excel.
If we think about the types of personalities that are pushing these changes, we are seeing non-empathetic, socially awkward loners in control. They are advocating for a world of more “advanced” learners who are “efficient” like they believe themselves to be. Yet, they don’t seem fully human, fully aware, fully willing to realize that their way of seeing the world is an anolmaly.
We watch the “Big Bang”. A rerun aired tonight. Sheldon had decided he’d protect himself from dying by becoming a virtual person, a shirt on a hanger kind of robot with a computer screen as a face. He wascable to use that internet access to research and post on spot “correct answers” to anything he wished to push.
Ultimately, it didn’t work out for him. Even his nerdy friends couldn’t deal with his robotic pomposity. I believe Leonard called him “R2D-bag”. Is that what we want American society to reflect? I don’t think most people will go for it. I surely don’t. I hope I am fully dead before such insanity becomes ” normal”. But I guess maybe that tiny %age of people is tired of every feeling, empathetic, imperfect human being considered normal while the they are going unnoticed. Who knows? It isn’t a world that makes sense to me.
Whoa, Deb. I don’t think we need to pick new scapegoats for the insanity we are experiencing today. Seriously, “Big Bang” is your model of what we need to fear? I would wager that you are not going to find many tech savvy kids that are thrilled by the misuse of technology that is driving much of education today. I can’t say I have met any kids who are thrilled to spend hours in endless testing to create a data picture of them. Do you see anyone clamoring to define themselves by numbers? Instead we have powerful adult forces who are mesmerized by the potential profit in monetizing education who see computer technology as an efficient and profitable way to do that. Technology is simply a tool, which is being misused. Our core values have been tabled by an economic ideology gone rabid. If they can market their ideology to the masses (which incidentally takes people with “people skills” rather than tech savvy) we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Testing. No. I hate testing. But the survivors of this will the few who can adapt. I merely think Gates is like Sheldon. He sees the successful world through his eyes. He is not normal. Since he has so much money, he has power and voice. People only care about money. He is creating a his way or no way path to financial success. It isn’t possible for many to achieve that. But lemmings wish and follow. They are ruining possibilities for non-techie persons. They are infiltrating and ruining education for the many in favor of the few who buy in.
The overuse and misuse of technology is definitely a big concern. The tech industry definitely wants to encourage the use of what they have to sell and the corporate efficiency crowd wants to encourage it not only for profit but for cost savings (hence more profit). Education becomes secondary. However, our kids will be tech savvy. They are being raised on it, and it is not threatening to them as it can be to those of us not immersed in it. I see it with my own kids. Two of them went through K-12 before computers became ubiquitous and the others never knew computers were “new fangled.” All of them have achieved a level of comfort I will never have although the older two became literate out of necessity rather than desire. It is no longer an issue for them. My objection is not to the use but to the abuse: drill and kill on a computer makes it no less offensive than if it is done with a pencil. Defining children by their scores on standardized tests is dehumanizing. I think we are probably pretty much in agreement as long as no one group (say like teachers?) gets demonized. Our system is out of whack and needs to be rebalanced so that no one faction has control.
I think that a lot of people want to give lip-service to turning around schools, and helping children but I believe that some, i cannot say all are truly afraid to hire people who can make a difference and bring schools to high levels of success. I wonder if they are afraid that their jobs will be on the line because these people who have the knowledge and the passion to do this work will make them look bad or is it because they do not want our students in the poor areas and schools to compete with the other students so if a principal is doing a good or great job in a tough school they want them out. A lot of success and failure in the NYCDOE system depends on the support of the superintendent, network and cluster leaders. It is really that simple and that complicated at the same time.
I think these people know exactly what they are doing, they are making it more difficult for children in poor areas who come from homes that are struggling. Go into a school in the bronx, in a poor district and one in manhattan in a rich district and see just the difference in computer use. Your lucky if you can get your computers on line once in a while in the bronx school, but in the other school all the computers will work. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when you cannot even get administrative and office staff computers to work because the building isn’t wired correctly. But in other schools in rich districts this would never be a problem, it would not be allowed to happen. One of the network support responses to not having computer access was to go to their office to use the computers. Ok, really, so a building leader or other staff must get in their car, or use public transportation to go to the district office and use their computers. What is wrong with this picture? This would never happen in a wealthy district. Network support would make sure the school was wired correctly so that administrators and students and teachers had computer access most of the time.
Again, this all comes down to I think fear of competition. Too much competition for the friends of Gates means that children who are struggling might get a job meant for the rich.
Lets not forget all the money the testing companies make and curriculum companies make off of this. Who suffers the children who cannot afford to prepare. Just having the stamina to sit for 90 minutes as a middle school student for a difficult test takes practice.
I think you are ascribing too much deliberation and insight to the forces driving this thing, which causes you to come up with conspiracy theory. Power and greed are blind bulldozers. The only power the people have against these forces are organization, vote, legislation. Steadily, for 35 years, we have elected people who run on a platform of cutting back gov to put more $ in the pockets of the little people, then turn around & untie legislation that protects the little people from these blind forces. At this point so many laws that were like check-valves have been undone that the spigot of power & greed- money runs steadily through every level of government. In education, the poor get trampled not because someone fears their competition or wishes to turn them into drones, but because they have the least power to combat the blind forces of power-hoarding and profit-making. Those forces are like one-eyed monsters which care nothing about social fallout; the eyes are trained on next quarter’s bottom line and next year’s primary.
4,580 letters and emails sent to Obama and Congress. That’s just me and my keyboard with no affiliations. Check out the map on the ‘activity report’ and you’ll see that vast majority of signers are from NY. That’s because we have experienced the big CC smack down for two straight years. Feel free to sign the petition and spread the word. Political pressure matters!
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
Not a bit impressed with what Lily had to say. Notice she no longer is calling for Duncan’s head. On top of that Obama came up with some double talk about changes in Education without really saying anything about changes. I’m sick of all these platitudes coming from people who are supposed to represent teachers. If you are going to make a statement, then make a strong one. Name names!! Say the words “Obama and Duncan”. Let them know we hold them responsible for all of this.
Last year we had ACCESS and NJASK. Then we had ANET and Achieve 3000 to prepare for the tests. In between we had CRTs to zero in on particular standards. It was one hot mess. This is not going to go away because Lily and Randi make tepid little statements. It is about big money interests and the sterilization of culture. They want teachers reading from scripts without deviation and children parroting responses. We have scads of new teaching materials that inform our waking moments. Gone is the free wheeling discussion of yesteryear. We are in the throes of an antidemocratic revolution.
Last period yesterday, one of my students found the word ghetto in the dictionary while doing a guide words exercise and read the definition aloud. Later, she saw me outside and yelled, “This is the ghetto!” I responded, “Thanks! I had no idea!” These kids know what they are up against and it is not going to be resolved by Gates and his ilk.
“Recent statements by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools and today’s report from Center for American Progress have confirmed that too often and in too many places, the education system has turned into a system of teach, learn and test with a focus on punishments and prizes.”
All they did was release a statement saying they’d review testing. This is really the rock-bottom minimum, and they only acted because there was public pressure which led to political pressure. I’m not sure we in the public should be showering them with compliments for releasing a statement that they plan to do something or other about over-testing, at some point in time. I guess it’s somewhat responsive, which is better than completely ignoring parents and teachers, but I don’t know that I’m hugely grateful.
They all pushed testing. Didn’t they always have a responsibility to check how it was going on the ground? If you act nationally and push an accountability regime that has a lot of terrible consequences locally, don’t you have to take responsibility for that result?
Because I know where this ends up: the blame will go down the chain to local actors. The national politicians and lobbyists and policy people who created this situation will say the tests are state or district, and they never intended for there to be so many. That isn’t “taking responsibility” – it’s legalistic parsing to shift blame.
The national ed reform people take credit for every local success that arises out of the policy they push. Shouldn’t they also accept responsibility for local failures that arise out of the policy they push? They seem to have it both ways.
I hate to be such a stickler, but this is not the language of people who are taking responsibility:
“There is a culture of testing and test preparation in schools that does not put students first. While the actual time spent taking tests might be low, a culture has arisen in some states and districts that places a premium on testing over learning. It is difficult to systematically document the prevalence of these activities. However, our research indicates that some districts and states may be administering tests that are duplicative or unnecessary; they may also be requiring or encouraging significant amounts of test preparation, such as taking practice tests.”
That’s from the Center for American Progress. “There is..” and “a culture has arisen” distances the national ed reform policy people from the consequences of the policy they push.
Where did this culture come from? Did it spring up organically in every school district in the country? Of course not. It came from national and state ed reform policy people who lobbied for “accountability” and tied everything in the world to standardized test scores.
They can rely on this careful distancing between federal, state and district if they want, it is *technically* TRUE that districts went as crazy as federal and state government, but they are (allegedly!) our national leaders on all things education, and ed reformers absolutely dominate policy circles. Maybe they could try actually taking responsibility instead of blaming local people?
I was just reading an email from the district central office about the 27,000 software licenses purchased for an on-line typing program. The purpose is to help students 3-8 grades be better prepared for the Smarter Balance. It is what teachers want according to the email. Imagine that lots of keyboarding software companies are gleeful about their expectations.
Lily is saying nothing new.
She is basically saying nothing at all!! She has had numerous meetings at the White House since her election and calling for Duncan’s resignation. Notice how Duncan is no longer the focus of any of these statements.
Here’s some more meaningless sounds coming out of Obama:
As the outcry against the overtesting of American children has grown, state and local education leaders – in a move endorsed by President Barack Obama – have announced a new focus on dialing back the volume of standardized testing and dialing up the quality.
“I have directed [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan to support states and school districts in the effort to improve assessment of student learning so that parents and teachers have the information they need, that classroom time is used wisely, and assessments are one part of fair evaluation of teachers and accountability for schools,” Mr. Obama said in a statement Wednesday night.
http://news.yahoo.com/overtesting-outcry-grows-education-leaders-pull-back-standardized-144916702.html;_ylt=AwrBT8nOIkFUoncAJUxXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzYjBmNmlpBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkA1ZJUDIyNl8x
I want to read about Lily E.’s ACTIONS… words are words… let us see ACTION.