Valerie Strauss here links to a two-year study conducted by the Council for Great City Schools, which documented that American students are drowning in standardized tests. In some schools, testing is the most important activity of the year.
Strauss writes:
The average student in America’s big-city public schools takes some 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the end of 12th grade — an average of about eight a year, the study says. That eats up between 20 and 25 hours every school year, the study says. As for the results, they often overlap. On top of all that are teacher-written tests, sometimes taken by students along with standardized tests in the very same subject.
In 66 school systems studied by the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit organization that represents the largest urban public school systems in the country, students in the 2014-15 school year sat over 6,500 times for tests, taking tests with 401 different titles. (See all the major findings below.)
High-stakes standardized testing has become a hallmark of modern school reform for well over a dozen years, starting with the use of these exams in the 2002 No Child Left Behind law to hold schools “accountable.” The stakes for these exams were increased with President Obama’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top funding competition, in which states could win federal education funding by promising to undertake specific reforms — including evaluating teachers by test scores and adopting “common standards.”
Here are some key points from the report:
* Testing pursuant to NCLB in grades three through eight and once in high school in reading and mathematics is universal across all cities. Science testing is also universal according to the grade bands specified in NCLB.
* Testing in grades PK-2 is less prevalent than in other grades, but survey results indicate that testing in these grades is common as well. These tests are required more by districts than by states, and they vary considerably across districts even within the same state.
* Middle school students are more likely than elementary school students to take tests in science, writing, technology, and end-of-course (EOC) exams.
* The average amount of testing time devoted to mandated tests among eighth-grade students in the 2014-15 school year was approximately 4.22 days or 2.34 percent of school time. (Eighth grade was the grade in which testing time was the highest.) (This only counted time spent on tests that were required for all students in the eighth grade and does not include time to administer or prepare for testing, nor does it include sample, optional, and special-population testing.)
* Testing time in districts i
s determined as much by the number of times assessments are given during the school year as it is by the number of assessments.
* There is no correlation between the amount of mandated testing time and the reading and math scores in grades four and eight on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why are there so many has a lot to do with the stakes attached to the big ones (and the big ones are mandated by federal law, however Obama, Duncan & Co. try to wiggle out of responsibility for that). When your school’s future, your teachers’ compensation/jobs and/or your students’ promotion and/or graduation depend on the BS Tests, you’re going to do a lot of little tests along the way to make sure you’re on target for those final ones.
The proliferation of federal, state, and local tests is largely the result of legislation aimed at evaluating teachers based on student achievement and “growth” measures. A growth measure often required a pretest and posttest for each subject and grade. In addition, 29 states adopted some version of the SLO process that required a pretest and posttest for each class. In Ohio, the SLO tests were the biggie in consuming time. That is why the SLO tests, usually district-wide and constructed by teachers, were cut in favor of an assigned “distributed score” for the school, meaning teachers in many subjects were evaluated on scores derived from subjects and grades they were never assigned to teach.
“In some schools, testing is the most important activity of the year.”
They had to know this, right? They were aware of the pre-test pep rallies that were going on everywhere up until about a year ago when that became suddenly “not done”?
I don’t know how anyone could read the investigator’s report in the Atlanta Public School situation and not come away completely convinced that this is out of control. I didn’t come away from that thinking “boy, these are some bad people”. I came away from it thinking “this system is insane and it harms people”.
In addition to the proliferation of tests to evaluate teachers it is important to recognize that standards-based reforms have been tied to standards “aligned” tests and data-mining. While it is possible for a single test to address multiple standards, it is useful to remember that the Common Core, in only two subjects, forced attention to about 264 standards per grade. In some schools the grade-level standards were “populated” into a data dashboard to remind teachers of their obligations to track “performance” on each standard, and often with special entries enabling disaggregated performance scores down the line.
The high stakes attached to test scores produced practice test galore. The testing report from the Council of Great City Schools did NOT count “test rehearsals” and varieties of test prep. The spokesperson Michael Casserly said that would likely take another two-year study. Casserly also made a big point of saying their association did not have any outside money to support their work. Perhaps that it why it strikes so many as free of spin and has clearly been a source of embarrassment to Obama, Duncan, the CCSSO, et al.
I read where hundreds of millions were spent. What companies were at the receiving end of this?
Very simple answer: there’s plenty of money to be made off the backs of those students and teachers!
WHY?
My view:
Corporate America has usurped the role of government, taken it over.
Until the American public demands change it “ain’t gonna happen”
Again
this is why I love Bernie Sanders. He has been honest enough to say so. He stated that no one, himself included cannot as president change things until the public rises up and demands change. He is trying to organize that opposition, much like Ralph Nader has tried to do.
It IS refreshing, for me at least, to see a politician who tells it like it is.
Not only are there way too many standardized tests, but the entire testing regime wastes far more time than just 2-3% of the school year.
The following are observations about the testing experience of my children in North Carolina public schools:
First, there are weeks and weeks of preparation before the end-of-grade (EOG) tests in grades 3-8. During this time the students are not exposed to any new material. This is a waste of instructional time.
Second, during exam nothing else of educational value occurs. Teachers are not allowed to teach for fear of disrupting the test-takers.
Third, after a week of testing, there are two or three weeks left in the year. This time is used by the teachers to tutor the students who failed the exams before they try again. All the children who passed are completely ignored. They are left to do things like play cards or watch movies. This is not educational.
So, I calculate that the testing regime in North Carolina caused my children to lose about 6-8 weeks per school year. If we take the conservative estimate of 6 weeks, then that comes out to about 1/6 of the school year. The school year is about 36 or 37 weeks. That is not 2-3%. That is over 16%. And it might actually be higher.
And these calculations are only for the EOG’s. When the other tests are added in, it approaches 20% of instructional time. It is such a waste. No wonder my children never got to do anything fun like be in a school play.
Teachers, parents/guardians, and students know there are TOO MANY TESTS and those TESTS are well … AWFUL. But, the DEFORMERS get rich off of their deforms. This is why they blame teachers. It’s this simple.