Carol Burris, high school principal in Rockville Center, Long Island, Néw York, wrote a public letter to Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Senator Alexander is the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Conmittee. He has said that he will press for a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.
Sen. Alexander released a draft of his proposed legislation. It includes two options for testing. Option 1: let the states decide. Option 2: retain the status quo, with a federal mandate for annual testing in grades 3-8.
Burris, who supported NCLB when it passed in 2001, explains how NCLB has failed. She reviews the negative consequences of high-stakes testing and offers her suggestions for fixing the law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on biochemlife and commented:
Something has to be done to get high stakes testing stopped.
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This was my letter:
Dear Senator Alexander:
I am a middle school English teacher for grades 6–8 at a small public school in the Hudson Valley. We’re a good school, no doubt about it. In 2010 my school was awarded Blue Ribbon status for the strength or our program and test scores. You would think that we would be in a great place in terms of the yearly testing that the NCLB and RTTP programs have required, but let me assure you that the truth is very different.
As I mentioned before, my school is quite small, and I am the only English teacher in the middle school. The students’ English education is my responsibility, and mine alone, something I take very seriously. Yet this mission is constantly being thwarted by federal testing mandates. A true English education would mean that kids get a great exposure to complicated, challenging, and interesting texts, yet the need to do test prep pushes me in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of classic literature, I am forced to give my students short essays, dozens and dozens of them, and then make them answer questions about them. My students hate this. They’d rather be learning poetry, or sailing with pirates, or crafting short stories, or strutting across Shakespeare’s stage. Yet NCLB has created just this, test preparation instead of a rich curriculum.
The critics may counter with, “No! That’s not how it’s supposed to be! You’re supposed to integrate the test prep within the curriculum!” True, there’s only a certain amount I can organically integrate test prep. After a point, I need to Xerox those hated essays and drop them on my kids’ desks. I estimate something like 10–20% of my year is engaged in test prep skills. This is the reality that NCLB has created. It’s made these tests so important that they dominate my curriculum like nothing else. Truly, was that the goal of NCLB?
Let us not forget that every student’s test score is also a measure of me. I am now evaluated by this one test, as if this is the very best way to know what I do in my classroom. How about that Shakespeare play I do every year? Sorry, that’s not on the test. What about the colonial era party, where every student makes a dish from the Revolutionary War period? Nope, not tested either. What about my journey through Ancient Greece through myths or leaping through space in my science fiction unit? Should I stop these? The testing regimen forced upon me seems to say that I should, because all that content doesn’t count anymore. My students and I are only measured by that score.
And what shall we do with the students who don’t do well, the ones who struggle? I can control, mostly, what happens in my classroom, but what about at home? I can’t force a kid who doesn’t study to put his nose to the grindstone. I can’t heal a child whose family life is chaotic, whose emotional turmoil prevents him or her from learning well. I can’t finance a family that’s stressed by poverty, who isn’t eating well and can’t focus. NCLB seems to insist that I employ god-like powers to fix these children so they do well on the yearly tests. It will even punish me with low evaluations if I don’t fix these children. How is this fair to my students or me? How is this even rational?
A testing moment I’ll never forget happened in the spring of 2013. One of my best students, let’s call him “Sam”, was taking the new Common Core tests for the first time. Sam was a student who wanted to do well, who always did well. His average for me was over 95 for three years straight. After the second day of testing, Sam came to me in tears. He pleaded for more time on the test because he hadn’t been able finish. My heart sank, because that was impossible. All I could do was say to this child, one who painstakingly wrote essay after essay for me, was “I’m sorry.”
If you want to use annual testing in a sane and meaningful way, you must take away its stigma. If you must test, give them in the beginning of the year and give teachers results in a timely manner to see what deficits that child has and help him/her. Right now we receive results about five months after they are given. It’s such a long period of time that the kids have already graduated to the next grade. What good is a test where you don’t get timely results? My tests evaluate what my students have learned and what I still need to teach them. The NCLB results come so far after the actual test that they are meaningless in terms of helping that child.
Even more importantly, you must remove the “high-stakes” part of the testing. Punishing kids, teachers, and schools for low test scores is damaging. It doesn’t help kids, or teachers, or schools. We are all trying our best to help children. We want to help kids no matter what his/her ability. Every child deserves our best efforts. Unfortunately teachers are now being punished for not being perfect. Who among us is that? Who among us can heal every wound? Who among us can lift up every single child? We do our best, of course, but that perfection is denied us. We are human. Yet NCLB demands my perfection, and my students and I will be punished because of low test scores. How is this ethical?
It needs to be said too that in my high-end public school I am shielded from many of these problems. Those who work in poverty-stricken or stressed neighborhoods are under much more stress from NCLB. These true heroes of education, those that spend their lives helping disadvantaged kids, are now failures because of low test scores. Their students too are punished. They must attend remedial class after class in this quixotic quest for high numbers, denying these needy kids art, music, and creative expression. How is this improving education? But of course, according to NCLB this enrichment is no longer important. It doesn’t measure a child’s musical ability, or verbal expression. Only test scores matter.
Please consider how damaging NCLB is to public education. It hurts rather than helps. It punishes children in poverty, stress, or those who struggle in a subject as well as their teachers. That said, if you truly want to design an effective education policy, please speak to teachers. We in the trenches of education are the experts in this matter, and we can help you. Too much education policy is designed by those who are not teachers, and this is one reason why it has gone so wrong. Listen to us. We speak the truth because we care very deeply about the children of America. So when we say high-stakes NCLB testing is destroying American education, we say this because that is the truth.
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It would be nice to think he might listen. Chances?
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When have they ever demonstrated (and stuck to it with more than lip service) a response to public outcry about any of their policies?
Even when they pay lip service, you need an interpreter to tell what they’re REALLY saying (e.g. too much testing means too much of other kinds of tests but not ours, civil rights means the right to segregate, choice for parents means charter choice and so on).
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That is one of the best letters I have ever seen on the testing subject…let’s hope he listens.
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The comments posted here suggest that Alexaner’s legislation is just a return RttT buried in a lot of happy talk. I haven’t had time to read the full bill (ca. 380 pages) yet, but this sound very serious.
Given Alexander’s past support of CC, the horrific corruption in D.C., and the powerful interests who aren’t going away without a fight, I would not be surprised if this is true.
We only have until January 21 to send comments. We also have to start pushing on our elected “representatives”. Only one, simple thing needs to be done: Repeal NCLB.
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I just find it incredibly disheartening that the one and only priority of the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress for public schools is testing. That’s what “line in the sand” means in negotiations. It means “this is the only thing we’ll fight for- everything else is negotiable”. They’ve all but assured they won’t get anything except testing.
What a fabulous menu of options I get out of DC. The Democrats, with a technocratic, relentlessly grim and joyless agenda for public schools that is focused like a laser on gathering data and imposing sanctions and offers no upside for existing schools even IN EXCHANGE for their obsession with testing, or Republicans, who are ideologically opposed to the continued existence of public schools and wrote a draft bill that fills page after page with provisions to fund charter schools but, like the Democrats, offers absolutely nothing positive for existing public schools other than “states may or may not test and sanction less”.
The best these folks can do for the schools that 90% of kids attend is “we might allow states to test and punish less, or more, depending?” It’s such an incredibly low bar they set for themselves.
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You’re right, Chiara. The choices are very depressing right now. There isn’t even a lesser-of-two-evils choice.
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I think the Democrat’s “concession” on testing is baloney. States and districts were already reducing testing and they were doing that in response to teachers and parents. Public school advocates did that. They got it without the help of anyone in DC or the “ed reform movement”. No one in the ed reform movement, including Arne Duncan, has taken the slightest bit of responsibility for over-testing, although their endless teacher evaluations were the main driver of testing.
They’re giving us a “concession” we already got without them. How did they plan on “reducing” state testing anyway? Republicans control most of the states. Were they going to mandate less testing like they mandated more testing? Now public schools will be stuck paying for another round of testing consultants?
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Chiara, apparently what Duncan wants is for states to reduce state and local testing, but not federally-mandated testing.
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What Duncan wants is to keep evaluating teachers using these tests and that’s the agenda we should also be fighting!
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“dianeravitch
January 19, 2015 at 10:39 am
Chiara, apparently what Duncan wants is for states to reduce state and local testing, but not federally-mandated testing.”
But if he “wanted that” why wasn’t it a priority the last 6 years? Instead, he doubled down on having kids take tests to use to rank their teachers.
We were told this same thing when Democrats passed NCLB. Sure, there were tests and sanctions attached to the tests,. but in return public schools would get “support”.
Democrats haven’t “supported” public schools at all. They’ve happily joined with Republicans to bash public schools at every opportunity. We got all of the bad and none of the good with NCLB and they’re getting ready to pull the EXACT same scam again.
In 2016 are Democrats going to tell us they managed to secure testing but never got the funding or supports they intended to get? They said the same thing a decade ago.
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This is a well written letter. Thank you again, Ms. Burris. Sadly, I suspect, that thanks to the Accountability Act, high stakes testing will remain in place for all grades in Alabama.
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