Amy Frogge is a member of the Metro Nashville school board. She was elected despite being outspent 5-1 by the corporate reformers who are trying to take over local and state school boards. Amy didn’t know anything about corporate reform when she decided to run for school board. She is a mom of children in Nashville public schools, and she is a lawyer. She went door to door and won her race.
Once she became a school board member, she realized that much was wrong. The charter industry was targeting Nashville, threatening to skim off the students they wanted and to reduce the funding for public schools. State-mandated testing, she discovered, was completely out of hand, a time-wasting burden to children and an unnecessary financial drain on the district’s schools.
This post has been widely shared on Facebook. Here, she explains why parents must get involved and act to defend their children from the unnecessary and excessive standardized testing to which they are subjected.
She writes:
So to clarify the problem, let’s consider some facts:
1. The average school in Nashville will lose 6-8 weeks of valuable instructional time to standardized testing this year.
2. My 9-year-old third grader will spend more time taking standardized tests this year than I spent taking the LSAT to get into law school.
3. This year, children in grades 3-5 will be expected to sit still for two and a half hours on one day alone to fill in bubble tests.
4. This year, third graders will be expected to type multi-paragraph responses to essay questions and perform sophisticated manipulations on the computer screen in order to even complete the tests.
I have to pause here to ask: Do the people who developed these policies have children- or have they even spent any time around real children? I don’t know about you, but my third grader does not yet have proficient typing skills, and he’s among the lucky MNPS students who use a computer at home. Over half of MNPS students do not have home computers, and because of ongoing funding deficits, public schools do not have all of the technology they need to allow every child time to practice as necessary.
Furthermore, as for all the so-called “accountability” generated by standardized testing, here are a few more facts:
1. The results of this year’s standardized tests will not be available until NEXT YEAR, when the students who took the tests have moved along to the next teacher and grade level- and sometimes the next school.
2. Test questions and responses are not available for review by teachers, parents, or students. In other words, the standardized tests upon which we are basing EVERYTHING are like a black box. How do we know the tests are even correct or appropriate when only the testing company has access to the information contained in them? (Luckily, a new bill is pending that might change this.)
3. About 70% of Tennessee teachers will be evaluated using test scores of children they have NEVER taught. (Stop and read that one again. Yes, it’s true.)
4. There’s plenty of research questioning the validity of using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. Research demonstrates that test scores are primarily influenced by out-of-school factors; only 7-13% of variance in test scores is due to teachers. (Haertel, 2013)
Why do I know all of this is wrong? Is it because I am a lawyer? Is it because I am a sitting board member who has spent years now considering education policy? Is it because I’m a genius?
No, it’s because I’m a mom. Also, I would like to think I have some common sense.
Those who say the tests help teachers help children are wrong. The results are not reported until the student moves on to another class. Furthermore, the results tell how children rank, but that does give the teacher useful information. Those who want to rank teachers by test scores don’t know that 70% of the teachers don’t have annual test scores and will be judged by the scores of students they never taught.
What can parents do?
OPT OUT. Refuse the tests. Tell the school that you will not allow your child to take the tests. They do not help your child. They do not improve teaching and learning. They make big money for testing companies, and they label most children as failures.
JUST SAY NO!
Well don’t look to the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) for help:
https://kilroysdelaware.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/national-pta-forces-delaware-pta-to-back-down-from-honoring-parents-right-to-opt-out-time-to-end-that-relationship/
As the ABOVE details, when the Delaware PTA started weighing in, in support of parents right to opt out their kids from testing — not urging parents opt out, mind you … just affirming parents’ right to do so — they sent a threat to Delaware PTA: ‘Stop backing a right to opt out … OR ELSE!’
NATIONAL P.T.A.: “It is useless to resist! The blood all non-believers in testing will flow in the streets, should you and they fail to renounce your heresy and obey forthwith!”
Just kidding… they didn’t say it in those exact words.
Seriously, here’s what the national PTA — which takes millions from Gates… hmmm… a coincidence? — ACTUALLY SAID to the Delaware PTA: (kinda the same thing š )
NATIONAL P.T.A.: “IImmediately cease advocacy efforts in support of the Delaware PTA Position Statement on Parent Opt Out HB50, including but not limited to: website promotion, action alerts, e-newsletters, media interview and information flyers.
“Per National PTA SOA Policy, if you are unable to comply with the SOA requirements by April 26, 2016 (60 days from this notification), a support team will be assigned to Delaware PTA to help create and implement a plan to move your PTA back into compliance..”
Do you think this kind of reaction in the face of obviously reasoned dissent is going to speed PTA affiliates along the path to becoming PTOs? I seriously doubt that the Delaware receives anything from the national worth buckling under to them. The PTA national no longer speaks for the interests of parents and teachers. Why continue to send dues money to an organization that will spend to undermine public education? Thanks for the info, Jack.
Support team? What a great euphemism. This is what happens when the managers of these organizations get paid way too much money. It is no longer in their financial interests to support the ordinary members.
I’m surprised Delaware has stuck with PTA this long. Google says only 25% of K-8 schools nationwide are in; membership peaked in 1962, is less than half that today despite record-hi sch enrollments. (My local NJ district has been PTO at least since ’92 when my kids started attending ps.)
The claimed benefit of PTA natl org has always been ‘for-the-kids’ programs. Browsing online I find fewer than 5 grant programs offering 1k (sometimes 2k) to a PTA to encourage arts, healthy meals, anti-discrimination. That seems very little return, especially if one has to pay for it in part by stifling local parental opposition to a natl ed policy.
Schools should stop participating in the national PTA. Form a “PTSO” (parent teacher student organization) — that way, all the dues paid stay local, and no one has to “refuse to join” in protest of the terrible policies of the PTA. Then, the PTA will have to get ALL their money from the Gates Foundation — and have zero parent members, zero teacher members, simply another of Gates’s astroturf organizations.
I agree. I like that she leads with the fact that testing wastes weeks of instructional time. This happens because the super long tests allow only one test per day, make-up days are needed, test prep takes up many weeks before the tests, and after the tests two weeks are spent tutoring those who did not pass while the other students do not receive instruction. These testing regimes are educational malpractice. They are an abomination.
I am not sure how school districts are held to task on things like how many days a student must be allowed classes (how many days per year a school must be in session). However, your statement that our modern-day testing regimes are a form of educational malpractice makes me wonder if there is actually legal recourse to sue/hold districts accountable for not allowing students a certain number of NON-testing days per year?
Everything’s bigger in Texas.
I just sat through 2.5 hours of “professional development” training yesterday on how to administer the STAAR, the state of Texas assessments of academic readiness. My 7th graders will sit for reading, math, and writing tests. Each test will be 4 hours long. If they finish early, they are expected to sit quietly and either read or sleep. When EVERYONE is finished with the test, only then are they allowed to visit. That’s real fun, keeping teenagers from talking, let me tell you. I dread this time of year. If they fail, they get pulled out of non-core classes to polish their skills. Then they get to re-take the test!
Let me tell you something. We already know who is going to fail! We’re already working with those kids!
Is all this really worth the $500 million dollars Texas has paid over the last 5 years to Pearson?
“I just sat through 2.5 hours of āprofessional developmentā training. . . ”
Ahhhh, don’t you just love being professionally developed? Nothing like a nice new shiny sparkly outlook, eh?
Allow me to zoom out for a minute and point out that the ongoing push for a longer school day/year has always been nothing more than a sales pitch meant to divert attention from the loss of instructional time due to the ramping up of useless standardized testing. The purpose of the longer day/year is to mitigate that loss, to keep the ratio of testing to teaching out of the “WTF?” range while simultaneously pretending that no overtesting problem exists.
I would make that a con game rather than sales pitch since there’s no product to sell. Even Pearson doesn’t have deep enough pockets to cause declining state ed budgets to reverse gear & expand to pay for keeping bldgs open & staffed for longer days/sch yr! But wait… maybe… if 100% of schools are charter, w/no stds for quality of ed or staff so we can have big classes staffed by min-wage-earners… nope, sorry, not enough profit. Sigh. We’d still have to peddle so much ed-ind-product that we couldn’t get out of the “WTF?” range. (my fave expression of the day!)
She echoes my thoughts about the “new” tests in Florida (which I had to endure training on, even though my students are too young to take them). Rolling through the sample questions with paragraphs for students to highlight and questions with multiple correct answers, not to mention the ridiculous amount of time given to each testing session, the FSA is strikingly like the GRE I took 3 years ago, which was grueling for me, an adult with a Master’s degree. So basically, we’re looking to see if our students are ready for college in third grade. Because we teachers are “held accountable” for the scores, classes taking these tests have to invest countless hours in How To Take the Test– not “teaching to the test,” but simply showing students how to use the computers and how to answer question types they’ve never seen before (because they are developmentally inappropriate anyway). I’ve always been a public school teacher, but now strongly considering private school when my own daughter is ready for school, no matter the financial sacrifice.
Reblogged this on education pathways and commented:
Why teachers should not be evaluated based on standardized test scores and why children should not take the tests in the first place.
Well said Amy!