Ann Cronin, retired teacher in Connecticut, posted a letter on her blog written by another Connecticut teacher and addressed to Secretary of Education-Designate Miguel Cardona:
Jeannette C. Faber writes to tell Dr. Cardona that it is time to end standardized testing, now!
Dear Commissioner Cardona:
Connecticut is proud that you, our Commissioner of Education, was chosen as the Biden/Harris administration’s Secretary of Education.
Educators support your dedication to: increasing graduation rates, closing the achievement gap, and ensuring equity for all students. All educators should be committed to making these goals a reality. America’s children need and deserve this.
However, educators also know that the regime of profit-driven standardized testing will not improve teaching and learning. They never have.
- If educators are forced to teach to a test in order to increase graduation rates, students are merely learning how to take a test. This is antithetical to what 21st-century learning should look like: problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, project-based learning, capstone projects, creativity, and more.
- If schools are pressured to close the achievement gap, but their only tools are computer programs that hold students hostage to rote “learning”, then students are not experiencing rich and meaningful learning. Only 21st-century learning experiences will increase graduation rates that are credible and that actually prepare students for a growingly complex world.
- If equity means giving students in impoverished areas less rich and meaningful learning, by continuing the standardized testing regime, the equity gap will only increase. What students in impoverished areas need is much more of what students in more affluent areas already have. Connecticut’s discriminatory per-pupil expenditure disparity tells the whole, sad story.
Dr. Cardona, what holds schools back from making meaningful progress are ill-conceived federal mandates. These mandates have never improved the quality of teaching and learning. They never will. Test scores may have increased. As well as graduation rates. However, those are meaningless if they are not products of rich and meaningful teaching and learning.
No standardized test can measure 21st-century skills. Hence, standardized tests cannot cultivate the acquisition of those skills.
We ask you, Dr. Cardona, to recommit yourself to the vital goals you have set by shifting the paradigm. Shift how we achieve those goals. That requires ending the testing regime started with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (2002 – 2015) and continued with Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” (2012 – 2016).
We, Dr. Cardona, are asking Connecticut’s teachers, parents, and students to send a strong message to you by refusing the standardized testing planned for this spring.
We are also asking all who oppose the standardized-testing regime to sign this petition, which will be delivered to you, Dr. Cardona.
We are all trying to survive a global pandemic. In my 25 years in the classroom, I have never seen my students so stressed, depressed, and anxious. It is unnecessary and insensitive to add to the weight of their mental health struggles by adding the stress of standardized testing. Also, when thousands of stressed, depressed, and anxious students are forced to take a standardized test, will the results be accurate? Were they ever really accurate? Able to capture what students know and can do? Teachers know the answer: No!
Now is the time to end standardized testing.
#RefuseTheTest
#DoNotTakeTestingToDC.
A faithful teacher,
Jeannette C. Faber – MS, MALS, EdD
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Testing should be the last thing anyone should consider as Covid rages across the nation. Dr. Farber makes a good case against useless, meaningless testing, that only serves to enrich corporations and close “failing public schools.”
It was dumb to lead with a demand for testing.
They haven’t done much of anything to assist public schools in the pandemic and they finally show up and the first and only thing they do is demand standardized testing?
Ed reformers don’t offer anything positive to public schools, public school families, or public school students. What’s amazing to me is how they seem to think they don’t have to offer anything positive- they completely take us, our schools and our students for granted. There’s not even the slightest effort to offer something that might be appealing to a public school parents – ALL we get is testing.
I know very few of them attended public schools or sent their children or grandchildren to public schools but do they have any idea how relentlessly grim and negative the ed reform agenda is regarding public school students? Can none of them come up with something positive and productive for our students? Tens of thousands of full time, paid ed reformers and this is what we’re offered as a response to the pandemic? The same tests they demand every year?
Cardona wrongly equates testing with equity. Nothing is further from the truth. Testing rates, ranks and punishes. Equity is about rebuilding resources so they help students according to need. Testing is tool used by privatizers to justify placing mostly black and brown students in separate and unequal schools. That process is about inequitable treatment. Bubble tests are waste of time and money, and as Dr. Faber points out, it takes time away from real, meaningful learning.
Amen
That is correct. Tests are used to deny civil rights, and that is all they are used for.
our hardest reality written into your first sentence, after two decades of trying so hard to get politicians to see things differently: Cardona wrongly equates testing with equity.
Here’s what ed reformers are offering public school students in Indiana as a response to the pandemic:
“Indiana politicians are seizing on the upheaval caused by the pandemic to push forward a vast expansion of taxpayer funding for private education, which could cost the state more than $100 million next year.
A top priority for House Republicans, House Bill 1005 would offer aid to thousands of students from middle-class families and children with special needs.”
They’re offering nothing to public school students or families. The entire focus is on lavish new funding of private schools.
It’s the same in Ohio. The +/- 90% of Ohio students who attend the unfashionable public schools got absolutely nothing out of state government, but they did manage to jam thru another voucher expansion!
I know what public school students will get out of ed reformers in Ohio. They’ll get the same garbage standardized tests they get every year, and that’s all they’ll get.
Have you noticed the ed reform response to the pandemic is identical to the ed reform agenda pre-pandemic?
Testing for public school students and promotion and marketing of charter schools and vouchers. Not a single new idea or positive proposal for students who attend public schools. They simply don’t serve our students.
— 15% enhancement of Pandemic EBT benefits for kids who’d normally get free school lunch
— SNAP increase eligibility expanded to include the 12 million poorest families previously left out.
That will do more to assist public school students in a pandemic than all the standardized testing in the world.
“I will end standardized testing.” Joseph R Biden
Petition signed and shared
Standardized testing ‘sounds’ as though it evens the playing field. However, it does not. What it DOES do is:
1. Use an enormous amount of money needed for supplies, teachers, etc.
2. Use an inordinate amount of teacher time.
3. Teaches to the test rather than offer real learning.
4. Make the gap between students larger.
The intent was noble but it is not fulfilling that!
Interesting that there is a grammatical error in the first paragraph from the submitted letter: ‘proud that you . . . was chosen!’ Ouch!
I’m trying to understand this issue from Cardona’s POV, to figure out what he values in them, and how he might be persuaded differently. There are so many reasons against the NCLB testing regime, and I suspect he agrees with some of them. His actions and words suggest he is uncomfortable with the high-stakes aspect and how it’s been implemented. As a principal and in district admin he directed support rather than punishment to teachers with low-scoring students. It seems like a small opening: attack the high stakes.
He seems to buy right into the idea that he needs data from every kid every year, that raising stdzd scores among poor minorities demonstrates better teaching/ learning. But that could be just the voice of an admin saying “I need indicators.” His entire admin career has been during the testing regime; these are the indicators he knows. Perhaps he can be persuaded to return to the days of periodic data captured from representative sampling– clearly 2 decades of expanded testing have not provided anything superior.
AND… he will have Cindy Marten at his right hand. Her admin career spans that same period, but her orientation is very different (perhaps because she has twice the teaching experience). From an in-depth interview when she became SD Supt in 2013
[https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/the-full-cindy-marten-interview-new-schools-chiefs-whole-take-on-her-big-task/]: “The aim in public education is to not produce a test score but to produce an active, literate, contributing participating member of society.” RE: Central Elementary, where she eventually was made principal, cited as a ‘beacon of success’: “we began, the first few years, as putting in the systems and structures, research based practices from the National Center for Urban School Transformation.” Lots of great stuff at that site; almost nothing about testing in their sharing practices section: https://ncust.com/teaching-practices-in-americas-best-urban-schools/ We can hope he works closely with her and learns something.
Cardona seems to share a common misperception about testing: It is a measure, not a remedy.
What it measures best is family income and opportunity to learn.
It does not close achievement gaps.
It does not provide equity.
will there be any consequences for Cardona or Biden? If not, will others suffer consequences?
how did the anti-testing Biden pick a pro-testing inexperienced bureaucrat? Testing is causing real damage daily and it continues NOW in california. continued kudos to Diane for speaking truth about this farce.
Duane is AWOL today, so I will take his place (w/o his permission–sorry!)
“Standardized” testing is neither valid nor reliable &, therefore, by definition, is NOT “standardized”: never has been & never will be. IT. MEASURES.NOTHING.
&–#1 what Connie said up there. Te$ting monopolies–CEOs, execs–getting rich $$$$$$$$, & all our education $$ (paid by we, the people, taxpayers) going to testing, so schools don’t have libraries, school nurses, smaller class sizes, guidance counselors, social workers–everything.
Someone up there said “this was a noble plan.” NO!!!! It NEVER WAS!! It surely came from…ALEC, almost 50 years old,& still going strong. If you haven’t read Democracy in Chains, you must. The intention, being, to keep “other people’s children” ignorant & unquestioning by closing public schools (on the basis of te$t $core$).
&, of course, I could go on & on, as we all do regarding this subject. Yes, Left Coast Teacher, hold Presidential feet to fire, “I will end standardized testing.”–President Joseph Biden.
Uh oh…I noticed this petition was on Change.org. I still don’t trust them. Remember when we signed a petition or two, then found our names down as members of Michelle Rhee’s Students First, Diane? Anyone know anything more about Change, this many years later?
I remember it well.
Good morning. I see a comment here expressing suspicion about signing a petition. I, Jeannette Faber, who wrote this letter, am the person who created the petition. I have no group or special interest behind me. I am simply a teacher. A high school English teacher, of 25 years. I created the petition for two reasons: 1. I am appalled that Commissioner Cardona is going ahead with state testing during a pandemic. And, 2. I want to start a movement that sends him a clear message to end federally mandated testing as Secretary of Education. I am just one person making a move. But is takes thousands to make a movement (to paraphrase Gloria Steinem). I do not mention my school district as our Board of Education recently added language to district policy about teachers ‘who engage in political activity that disrupts the educational process’ being subject to admonishment. Ostensibly, a Google search could satiate any curiosity about my being a public school teacher. I am also on my union’s Executive Board. If you would like to email me, please do: nettiefaber@gmail.com.
Thanks, Jeanette, for the response. The suspicion had to do w/change.org.