Thanks to Common Core and the federally-funded PARCC exams, children in Ohio schools will be tested 10 hours to demonstrate their proficiency or lack thereof. District superintendents say (as do parents and teachers and students), this is ridiculous!

 

While Arne Duncan is posting his benign views about testing–and how important it is to compare your child to children everywhere–in newspapers across the nation (so far, the same Duncan op-ed has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsday, and the Denver Post), those suffering under his test-centric, student-hostile regime are not happy about it.

 

Superintendent Jim Lloyd in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, said the amount of time required by PARCC testing was “an abomination.”

 

Avon Lake Superintendent Robert Scott agreed, saying that “the big bucks of testing companies, curriculum companies, and software companies” are clouding education debates with their own agendas.

 

He said: “High stakes testing is driven by a misunderstanding of how to motivate students and schools to achieve and/or maintain high academic results.”

 

Scott called the testing system a “(dis?)incentive program” that doesn’t help struggling schools and wastes the time of high-performing ones.”

 

Unlike Arne Duncan, who is not an educator and never taught, the district superintendents in Ohio recognize the disaster that Arne is now inflicting on the children of Ohio and the United States. Duncan will be remembered in the history books as a man who wrought harm on public education and the lives of children.