Rep. Jamaal Bowman is leading the fight in Congress to reverse the Biden decision to require standardized testing this spring. Randi Weingarten is president of the AFT. Jamaal was a middle school principal in the Bronx before he was elected to Congress. He was a leader in the opt-out of testing movement.
Together they wrote an article posted by NBC News about why the spring tests should be canceled.
A great way to inform the public.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m less worried about the tests and more worried that the covid recovery in schools will be designed by the same narrow set of “market based ed reformers” who have dominated public education for the last 20 years.
I worry people who work in public schools and support public schools and use public schools will have no role in planning because only ed reform echo chamber members are permitted at the table.
I want public school policy to be designed by people who value public schools and public school students. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Ed reform’s goal is to privatize public schools. How does that benefit students in public schools? Not at all, which we’ve seen. Why can’t public school students have actual advocates in government? Charters and voucher students have ed reformers to advocate on their behalf. Who works on behalf of public school students?
I was somewhat of a pioneer in ESL as I was one the earliest people to get master’s degree in the field. With few commercial materials in the market, I wrote my own materials. While it was time consuming, it was a very creative time over which I had autonomy. By the time I retired in the middle of NCLB, ELLs were being choked by so many mandates and tests it was disheartening. Test and punish is a sledge hammer to America’s public schools. Privatizers want to make public schools so punitive, nobody will want to attend them.
the true sickness being that so much research was being conducted at the same time to warn AGAINST testing ELL kids — arguing that testing would produce the opposite effect
At the beginning of the testing craze, testing for ELLs was presented as essential because “these students are forgotten otherwise.” That was untrue where I worked.
In DC, the establishment thinks testing raises test scores.
Testing boosts test scores”
Testing lifts all scores
Like tidal waves lift boats
Like dynamite lifts floors
And crooked pols lift votes
First of all, I would like to say that I’m excited by the arrival of Congressman Bowman in the House of Representatives. I find him to be a voice of student centered reason in a den of corporate iniquity. Although I agree with halting testing this spring, I think the real aim should be a permanent ban. The data, actually provided by these tests, is very clear that the Standards Movement accentuated by high stakes testing has resulted in no academic gains over the past 3 decades. If we look at NAEP prior to the pandemic, there were actually declines in reading. As a Principal, I would posit that this is for two reasons: One, too much time is taken away from meaningful instruction for test prep, and two, I witnessed increased student apathy toward the significance of these tests. It’s really not difficult to understand, stop the tests and spend that money on teacher preparation and support. That’s what works around the world, yet we refuse to do it here.
Paul,
I totally agree!
Why keep doing what has already failed?
By mandating testing in 2021, the Biden administration is causing a disaster during a disaster.
He doesn’t care just as he doesn’t care that in “respecting” the decision of the Senate Parliamentarian (which his own VP could have overruled), Biden denied a living wage to millions of Americans.
He obviously has more respect for the Parliamentarian then he has for “ordinary” Americans trying to make ends meet during a very difficult time.
Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and it’s application to the education of the child. The test is NOT assessment, it’s judgement.
Assessment is essential as students return from extended time off. This information must go directly to teacher to guide the students lesson planning.
and test score judgement being used to elevate the privileged and sledgehammer the non-privileged is not just wrongheaded but immoral
exactly
Test em High
Testing day is “judgement day”
Torture them and hang em high
Make the kids and teachers pay
Make em suffer till they die
Years ago a friend of mind lost their tween-aged daughter tragically in a completely unanticipated medical event. It is hard to accurately describe the kind of inner and outer shock this caused all of us, even myself, really just an acquaintance of the family, BUT a mom of teen-agers at the time.
At one point when I was doing my best to be supportive and empathetic the mother confided in me that she could no-longer read hebrew. We agreed that that was understandable and that the skill would certainly come back.
Giving adolescent students standardized tests before we are even completely out of this national emergency that has affected then in ways difficult for an adult (with greater time perspective) to understand would be like me concentrating on the reading of Hebrew in that conversation and suggesting she take a test to measure the skill.
I am teaching remote high-school right now and soon a hybrid model that will mostly just give the students a place to come during the day where they will still be remote. For some students even this will be a relief and an easing of the strains that have been put on them. Students are becoming more and more lethargic as this emergency drags out and when they are not lethargic many of them are cheating which is a panic response that many have now dug themselves into.
Have a heart people. Health and well-being come first.
Jamal Bowman, and other members of his freshman class in Congress, like Cori Bush and Mondaire Jones, as well as those in the sophomore class like Lucy McBath and Lauren Underwood (and of course AOC) are a breath of fresh air. They are regular people who had regular lives before their elections and therefore are actually representative of the public they serve. The Justice Democrats have lived up to their name by finding and supporting folks like these to win their elections.
What I do find to be a bit of obfuscation in this article is Randi passing herself off as a teacher in the trenches during testing. With about a year and a half in the classroom before NCLB, Randi hasn’t got much more time than most TFA. She’s a lawyer and a labor leader; it’s okay to be honest about that.
Speaking of Jamal Bowman:
The federal government is set to spend nearly $200 billion to safely reopen schools, boost state spending on low-income school programs and increase financial aid at universities as part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.
To Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), that spending looks more like triage than investment. On Saturday, the freshman congressman is set to unveil a $1.16 trillion proposal to fund climate-friendly retrofits at every K-12 public school in the nation, hire and train more teachers, and beef up funding for low-income and disability-focused programs.
Before COVID-19 killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and made in-person classes unsafe, nearly 8,000 public schools sat within 500 feet of highways, truck routes and other traffic-clogged roads where roughly 4.4 million students breathed air filled with toxic levels of exhaust pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 1 in 5 schools has at least one classroom with unsafe levels of radon, a radioactive gas that causes lung cancer. Countless more schools struggle with mold, toxic building materials and excessive heat, particularly as climate change worsens heat waves.
The proposal aims to spend $250 billion over 10 years to retrofit schools, remediating lead and asbestos, equipping facilities with solar panels and batteries, and increasing energy efficiency and air circulation. Once those upgrades are complete, it would slash emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide by at least 29 million tons per year, the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. The work would also create demand for more than 100,000 construction and maintenance jobs, split roughly in half between red and blue states.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jamaal-bowman-green-new-deal-schools_n_604c3494c5b6cf72d09661cb?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
Speaking of Randi, I find this hard to swallow; she and Chuck Schumer worked together to send money to private schools, yeshivas and Catholic schools with the Covid relief package:
Schumer and a Teachers’ Union Leader Secure Billions for Private Schools
The pandemic relief bill includes $2.75 billion for private schools. How it got there is an unlikely political tale, involving Orthodox Jewish lobbying, the Senate majority leader and a teachers’ union president.