Archives for category: Common Core
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EngageNY=Lock-Step Teaching=Dumbing Down Our Kids

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2015 //
38

This post is a description of EngageNY, the scripted curriculum written for use in New York state and now migrating to other states. Ken Wagner, former deputy commissioner of the New York State Education Department, now Rhode Island state superintendent, promises to import them to Rhode Island. New York’s new state commissioner says she used the New York curriculum with great success in Florida. Read this post and decide for yourself. Be sure to read the comments.

Here is a sample:

The same people who gave us standardized testing have now given us standardized teaching, which goes directly to the information a student can get, how the student gets it, and what the student is supposed to get out of each and every class minute. It is 19th-century educational lockstep, pushed by the White House and institutionalized by the New York governor’s office.

If standardized testing dumbed down school and teacher evaluation, standardized teaching takes it a step further: It dumbs down the kids.

The project is called “Engage New York.” It does anything but.

If, say, you are a teacher of 11th-grade English in Buffalo, you get, every 10 weeks, a thick three-ring binder with instructions on what you are to do in every class. The copy I have of one of these runs 587 pages. The volume is excruciatingly boring to read. (I cheated: I skimmed most of the pages.) I cannot imagine what it is like to be a creative and imaginative teacher hamstrung by it. Worse: I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a student in classes that now have to be taught by teachers forced to deliver this drivel or be fired.

The book is divided into teaching “modules,” which list what questions the teachers should ask, what answers they should get, and how they should respond to them. They list what words students should learn each day.

There are regular pages headed “Unit-at-a-Glance Calendar,” telling the teacher the specific lines and paragraphs to be covered in each class. There are pages listing “Activity” items for each class; each named activity includes the percentage of class time to be devoted to it. One, for example has “Activity 1: Introduction of Lesson Agenda. 5%”; Activity 2: Homework Accountability. 10%”; “Activity 3: Masterful Reading. 5%”; “Activity 4: Hamlet Act 1.2, Lines 900-110 Reading and Discussion, 60%.”

Day after day of this, class after class, minute by minute.

The questions the teachers are ordered to ask are often so banal they read like a Monty Python parody. Here is an example. The teacher is told to ask the question, “What information do you gather from the full title of the play: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?” (All teacher questions are in bold type.)

Permissible student answers are:

—The play is about a person named Hamlet.

—This is a tragic or sad play.

—Hamlet is a prince.

—This play likely takes place in Denmark.

This is drivel. The book is full of things like that. It is also full of misinformation.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, New York

Senate’s “Every Child Achieves Act” Passes by 81-17

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
48

Minutes ago, a bipartisan majority of the Senate approved the Every Child Achieves Act, which is the bill forged by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) and Patty Murray (D-WA). This is the long-overdue reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the legislation passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law on January 8, 2002. The underlying legislation is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, whose purpose was to authorize federal aid to education targeted to schools that enrolled significant numbers of children living in poverty. The original bill was about equity, not testing and accountability.

 

The Senate bill retains annual testing, but removes federal sanctions attached to test results. Any rewards or sanctions attached to test scores will be left to states. The Senate rejected private school vouchers; nine Republican Senators joined with Democrats to defeat the voucher proposal. The bill also strengthens current prohibitions against the Secretary of Education dictating specific curriculum, standards, and tests to states, as well as barring the Secretary from tying test scores to teacher evaluations. The bill repudiates the punitive measures of of NCLB and RTTT.

 

The House of Representatives has already passed its own bill, called the Student Success Act. A conference committee representing both houses will meet to iron out their differences and craft a bill that will then be presented for a vote in both houses.

 

As I get additional details, I will post them.

 

Speaking for the Network for Public Education, I will say that we are pleased to see a decisive rejection of federal micromanagement of curriculum, standards, and assessments, as well as the prohibition of federal imposition of particular modes of evaluating teachers. We oppose annual student testing; no high-performing nation in the world administers annual tests, and there is no good reason for us to do so. We reject the claim that children who are not subjected to annual standardized tests suffer harm or will be neglected. We believe that the standardized tests are shallow and have a disparate impact on children who are Black and Brown, children with disabilities, and children who are English language learners. We believe such tests degrade the quality of education and unfairly stigmatize children as “failures.” We also regret this bill’s financial support for charter schools, which on average do not perform as well as public schools, and in many jurisdictions, perform far worse than public schools. We would have preferred a bill that outlawed the allocation of federal funds to for-profit K-12 schools and that abandoned time-wasting annual testing.

 

Nonetheless, we support the Senate bill because it draws a close to the punitive methods of NCLB and RTTT. It is an important step forward for children, teachers, and public education. The battle over “reform” now shifts to the states, but we welcome an era in which the voices of parents, educators, and students can mobilize to influence policies in their communities and states. We believe that grassroots groups have a better chance of being heard locally than in Washington, D.C., where Beltway insiders think they speak for the public. We will continue to organize and carry our fight for better education to every state.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Network for Public Education, Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Pennsylvania Test Scores Plummet

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
26

Pennsylvania’s test scores dropped again. Rigor!

The curriculum is developmentally inappropriate, the tests are two grade levels above grade level. Class sizes are growing because of budget cuts. Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.

Rigor was designed to fail more students and pave the way for privatization. It is working.

Categories Common Core, Pennsylvania, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

D.C. Math Teacher: Common Core Tests Hurt My Students.

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
16

Joseph Herbert teaches math at Wilson High School in the District of Columbia. In this post, he explains how PARCC, the Common Core test, hurt his students. He supports the Common Core but not the tests.

He writes that the current “reforms” are deeply flawed.

“The problem is two-fold: (1) the data collected do not reliably give us the information that reformers claim they do, and (2) the over-emphasis on testing is sucking the life and joy out of school, interfering significantly with actual teaching and learning, and narrowing the curriculum.”

VAM, he says, is unreliable and invalid, as is the data it produces.

Students lost many weeks of instructional time because of testing:

“Our freshmen and sophomores took over seven hours worth of PARCC tests in the month of March alone. Furthermore, they had a second round of PARCC tests in May followed shortly thereafter by final exams in June. Ultimately, these children had three out of the last four months of school dominated by tests.

“Previously, all students took the paper-and-pencil DC-CAS standardized test at the same time, and instruction was disrupted for about a week. With the new PARCC test, there was a much more protracted disruption to instruction. The PARCC test is administered online, but Wilson simply does not have the technological infrastructure to test large numbers of students simultaneously. Without the necessary IT infrastructure we were forced to test small groups of students on a rotating basis.

“As a result, we spent over three weeks administering the first round of PARCC tests alone. Students were forced to miss class to test while their classes went on, causing them to lose valuable instructional time.”

He does not blame the Common Core standards. He blames PARCC. To those who think we need annual testing, he points out that NAEP reports the gaps every two years, without the intrusiveness of PARCC.

He writes:

“Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what kind of experience we want our children to have in school. I believe that kids learn more when they’re excited to come to school. I believe they learn more when they have meaningful and thoughtful questions to ask and answer. I believe math can and should be fun.

“I believe that if we want to stem the tide of DC’s dropout crisis, school should be a worthwhile place to attend, not a miserable experience of test taking.

“I believe that if we want to close the achievement gap, we need to have an open and honest conversation about what students need from school, what they want from school, and how we can get data on student performance without perversely affecting their school experience.

“Most of all, I believe that school is a place for profound growth and learning. Anything that detracts from or actively impedes that must go.”

Categories Common Core, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: Arne Duncan’s Children Were Never Exposed to Common Core

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
23

Mercedes Schneider reports that Arne Duncan sent his children to public schools in Arlington, Virginia, but Virginia never adopted the Common Core standards.

Now, as we know, his children will attend the University of Chicago Lab school, a progressive school that does not use the Common Core standards.

If the CCSS are imperative for America’s children, why has Duncan avoided placing his children in schools where they would encounter them? Doesn’t he want to know how they are doing compared to children in other states? Doesn’t he want them to be college-and-career-ready? Doesn’t he want them to be prepared for global competition?

It doesn’t make sense.

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne

Jeff Bryant: Washington Post Was Wrong about Arne: He Has Destroyed Trust in the Federal Role in Education

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
17

Jeff Bryant, Director of the Education Opportunity Network, faults Lyndsey Layton’s sympathetic portrayal of Arne Duncan. She portrays him as someone who is a good listener, a big-hearted fellow who won wide acceptance for charter schools, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the Common Core. Bryant says she got the story wrong. He says that reporters for the big national newspapers think that if they interview people in think tanks inside the Beltway, they have the real story. In fact, people inside the Beltway think tanks live in an echo chamber, almost completely detached from the rest of America and the consequences of the policies they promote.

Bryant says Layton got it wrong: Arne is not a good listener; in fact, he never listens to anyone unless they agree with him. Most Americans still don’t know what charter schools are. Test-based teacher evaluation has been a flop, and increasing numbers of states are dropping the Common Core and/or the tests that Arne paid $360 million for.

The most notable result of Arne’s stewardship of the U.S. Department of Education is that both parties have agreed to legislation that would neuter future Secretaries of Education and strip them of the power to punish schools, districts, and states. This is not exactly a resounding endorsement of his leadership. You might say that it is a bipartisan repudiation of it.

Bryant is quietly furious. He cites Arne’s “white suburban moms” quote about the anti-testing revolt in New York. He did not mention Arne’s infamous claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans’ public schools: It wiped out the public schools, created a pretext to fire 7,500 mostly African American teachers, eliminated the teachers’ union, and turned New Orleans into a privatized district. Nor did he mention Arne’s other memorable quote, that he wants to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know that he or she is college-bound. When you see the kind of absurd comments that he is apt to make off-the-cuff, you can understand why he sticks with talking points and a tight script.

Duncan’s policies failed because he never listened to critics. He listened, or appeared to, then ignored whatever he may have heard. As Bryant writes, “Every time experienced educators challenged Duncan to question his agenda and reconsider policy directions, he responded by … continuing down the same course.”

The worst legacy of Duncan’s tenure is that Congress is determined to limit the role of the federal government in the future and to forfeit the good things that the federal government has done in the past.

He writes:

What’s particularly unfortunate about that policy direction is that the federal government historically has had a mostly positive influence in public schools. As the article reminds us, what we now call NCLB was “initially passed in 1965 as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” a law that “was originally designed to protect the nation’s neediest students, and that the federal government must play a significant enforcement role to ensure that poor students, racial minorities and students with disabilities all receive an equal education.”

Because of that act, millions upon millions of impoverished children have had resources funneled to their schools through programs like Title I. Students who do not speak English as their first language have had funds sent to their schools to pay for specialists. Students who have physical disabilities, social-emotional problems and trouble with their learning and intellectual development have had more access to education opportunities and better supports in their schools. More girls and young women have been provided opportunities to play sports and experience a full curriculum.

Sure, this federal mission has not always been fully funded or adequately implemented. But that was the goal, and it was the goal NCLB took our attention away from and the goal this blundering oaf of a secretary refused to take up as his primary job, even though everyone outside his inner circle clamored he do so.

So the biggest tragedy of Arne Duncan is not only the millions of students and families ill-served under his tenure but the millions that will likely be ill-served in the future because it looks like his self-righteous, narrow-minded zeal will leave the federal government’s role in education marginalized for the immediate and foreseeable future.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, U.S. Department of Education

Pioneer Institute Calls on Mass. Commissioner to Step Away from PARCC Decision

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2015 //
31

The Pioneer Institute is a conservative think tank in Boston. Unlike most conservative think tanks, it opposes the Common Core and the associated testing. This week, Pioneer called on State Commissioner if Education Mitchell Chester to recuse himself from deciding whether Massachusetts should keep its MCAS state tests or drop them for PARCC. Chester is chairman of the PARCC board. Pioneer says he has a conflict of interest. Seems obvious, no?

Here is Pioneer’s statement:

“Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester Should Recuse Himself from the Upcoming Decision on PARCC and MCAS

“BOSTON – Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, who later this year will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the board) about whether to replace MCAS tests with those developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), chairs PARCC’s governing board.

“Pioneer Institute calls on Chester to recuse himself from the MCAS/PARCC decision process for the following reasons:

“1. As commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (the department), Chester serves as secretary to the board of education and oversees the state agency and hearing process for choosing between MCAS and PARCC. The agency he heads gathers the information on which the policy decision will be made and conducts the internal evaluation. Commissioner Chester ultimately makes a recommendation to the board about which test to choose.

“This is clearly a conflict of interest. Taking this matter out of the context of education makes the point perhaps more evident. Imagine that the general manager of the MBTA also chaired the board of Keolis or Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad when the two companies were competing for the $2.6 billion contract to operate the T’s commuter rail system. Such a conflict of interest would never have been tolerated, yet this is precisely the situation given the commissioner’s leadership role at the PARCC.

“2. In its role managing a series of five statewide public hearings that are currently underway on whether the board should officially adopt PARCC and abandon MCAS, the department chooses who to invite to deliver expert testimony. The invited experts speak first and are allowed more time than members of the general public. Thus far, in the first four hearings, a strong majority of the invited experts have been supporters of PARCC.

“3. Commissioner Chester has also formed a team of Massachusetts/PARCC Educator Leader Fellows within the department. According to a memo Chester sent to district and charter school leaders, the PARCC fellows, who receive a stipend, should be “excited about the content of the Common Core State Standards” and “already engaged in leadership work around them.” The department has no MCAS fellows.

“4. The commissioner’s interactions with local education leaders have led many to believe that the decision to abandon MCAS has already been made. Brookline Superintendent and Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents President William Lupini, in a 2014 letter to the town’s school committee, flatly stated that “MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new ‘next generation’ assessment after the 2015 test administration.” (No other “next generation” test or MCAS 2.0 is under development or consideration.)

“5. Given that the PARCC consortium originally included 26 participating states and Washington, DC, but now includes only seven and DC, there is enormous pressure on the commissioner, as the chairman of PARCC, to ensure that the testing consortium does not lose any more states. This is especially so after a spring during which numerous states declined further participation in PARCC; just last week one of the few large states remaining in the consortium (Ohio) left the consortium.

“The financial viability of PARCC is in great part a function of the number of students it services. When PARCC included 26 states and DC, it could plan its pricing strategy on the basis of serving over 25 million (of the over 31 million) public school students enrolled in those jurisdictions. With the loss of Ohio, PARCC has been reduced to serving just over 5 million. Additional consortium states, most immediately Arkansas, are actively working toward similar departures. Massachusetts’ almost one million public school students are of considerable concern to the consortium’s financial viability, therefore creating an untenable ethical position for the Commissioner.

“Sadly, the larger process of choosing between Massachusetts’ previous academic standards and Common Core, which led to the current MCAS/PARCC issue, is already one that has been rife with at least the appearance of conflict of interest. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and then to market Common Core. Oddly, Commissioner Chester relied on three studies conducted by Gates-funded entities, directly or indirectly, to inform his 2010 recommendation that the board of education adopt Common Core. A 2010 WCVB-TV 5 investigation found that Chester and other department personnel accepted $15,000 in luxury travel and accommodations from Common Core supporters prior to the board’s adoption of the Common Core.

“As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Governor Baker opposed Common Core and PARCC. In March of this year, he criticized the MCAS/PARCC process and earlier procedures that resulted in the adoption of Common Core, telling the State House News Service, “I think it’s an embarrassment that a state that spent two years giving educators, families, parents, administrators and others an opportunity to comment and engage around the assessment system that eventually became MCAS basically gave nobody a voice or an opportunity to engage in a discussion at all before we went ahead and executed on Common Core and PARCC.”

“Such practices need to end, and the public’s trust in the department’s ability to manage a publicly impartial, transparent and accountable process needs to be restored. The first step is for Commissioner Chester, who chairs PARCC’s governing board, to recuse himself from the upcoming policy decision about whether to replace MCAS with the PARCC test.

“In cases where there are several apparent conflicts of interest, recusals are an appropriate administrative response meant to uphold the public trust.”

Categories Common Core, Massachusetts, Standardized Testing

Researcher: SBAC Test Is Not Valid or Reliable or Fair

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2015 //
37

A new blogger enters the education fray with timely questions about the validity, reliability, and fairness of the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the Common Core test paid for by the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Roxana Marachi, Associate Professor in the Department of K-8 Teacher Education at San Jose State University has launched a blog called http://eduresearcher.com/.

In this post, she raises important questions, such as:

Q1: How is standardization to be assumed when students are taking tests on different technological tools with vastly varying screen interfaces? Depending on the technology used (desktops, laptops, chromebooks, and/or ipads), students would need different skills in typing, touch screen navigation, and familiarity with the tool.

Q2: How are standardization and fairness to be assumed when students are responding to different sets of questions based on how they answer (or guess) on the adaptive sections of the assessments?

Q3: How is fairness to be assumed when large proportions of students do not have access at home to the technology tools that they are being tested on in schools? Furthermore, how can fairness be assumed when some school districts do not have the same technology resources as others for test administration?

Q4: How/why would assessments that had already been flagged with so many serious design flaws and user interface problems continue to be administered to millions of children without changes/improvements to the interface? (See report below)

Q5: How can test security be assumed when tests are being administered across a span of over two months and when login features allow for some students to view a problem, log off, go home (potentially research and develop an answer) and then come back and log in and take the same section? (This process was reported from a test proctor who observed the login, viewing and re-login process.)

Q6: Given the serious issues in accessibility and the fact that the assessments have yet to be independently validated, how/why would the SmarterBalanced Assessment Consortium solicit agreements from nearly 200 colleges and universities to use 2015 11th Grade SBAC data to determine student access to the regular curriculum or to “remedial” courses? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/04/sbac.html.

She includes a startling graph produced by SBAC, with projected failure rates in the 11th grad math tests for different subgroups.

67% of all students are expected to fail
83% of African-Americans ” ”
80% of Latino students ” ”
93% of English language learners ” ”

She adds:

“Evidence of Testing Barriers and Implementation Problems

The Board is encouraged to consider the following evidence documenting serious concerns regarding the validity, reliability, security, accessibility, and fairness of the SmarterBalanced Assessments.

SmarterBalanced Mathematics Tests Are Fatally Flawed and Should Not Be Used documents serious user-interface barriers and design flaws in the SmarterBalanced Mathematics assessments. According to the analyses, the tests:

“Violate the standards they are supposed to assess;

Cannot be adequately answered by students with the technology they are required to use;

Use confusing and hard-to-use interfaces; or

Are to be graded in such a way that incorrect answers are identified as correct and correct answers as incorrect.”

“The author notes that numerous design flaws and interface barriers had been brought to the attention of the SmarterBalanced Assessment Consortium during the Spring 2014 pilot test, and remained unresolved during the Spring 2015 test administration.”

The post includes comments by teachers and administrators about the problems with SBAC.

She closes her blog with this reflection on the predicted failure rates:

“My letter to the Board is to encourage responsible, ethical, and legal communications about the assessment data that will apparently soon be disseminated to the public. Students’ beliefs about themselves as learners will be caught up in the tangle of any explanations surrounding the assessments, and as we know, decades of research demonstrate the power of student belief to be a factor impacting subsequent effort and persistence in learning.”

Categories Common Core, Standardized Testing

Washington State: Nearly 30% of 11th Graders Opt Out

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2015 //
5

The revolt against high-stakes testing continues in a big way in Washington State.

Nearly 30% of 11th grade students refused to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the test of the Common Core standards paid for by federal funds.

“Over one quarter of eligible Washington state high school juniors opted out of taking the Smarter Balanced exams this past spring, according to preliminary statistics released by the state education department—but in reality, the opt-out rate could be much higher.

“Officially, 27.4 percent of eligible students were “confirmed refusals” for taking the Smarter Balanced English/language arts exam, and 28.1 percent of them were confirmed refusals for the math exam. However, the percentage of potential refusals for the state could actually be much higher—the department puts the share of “potential refusals” at anywhere between 28 percent and 53 percent for both the math and E/LA tests, which are aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

“That means more than half of juniors didn’t take the test. But the state isn’t yet sure whether some of them officially refused the test or didn’t take it for some other reason.”

Categories Common Core, Opt Out, Standardized Testing, Washington State

Leonie Haimson: Setting the Record Straight about the Every Child Achieves Act

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2015 //
79

Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters and Student Privacy Matters, writes here about the Every Child Achieves Act and the distortions that are filling her email box these days. Haimson is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education and a fearless supporter of public education.

She writes:

Over the last few days, I have been flooded with blog posts, Facebook comments, memes and tweets, claiming that the bi-partisan bill to be debated this week in the Senate, called ECAA, or Every Child Achieves Act, must be opposed, because it “locks in” Common Core and many of the worst, test-based accountability policies of Arne Duncan and the US Department of Education.

Yet this is far from the truth. For nearly 13 years, students have suffered under the high-stakes testing regime of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). NCLB was likely the dumbest law ever passed by Congress, because it required that all public school children in the United States reach “proficiency” by 2014 as measured by test scores, or else their schools would be deemed failing.

The inanity of NCLB was exacerbated by Race to the Top and other policies pursued by Arne Duncan that put testing on steroids. These policies treated our children as data points, reduced our schools to test prep factories, and attempted to convince parents that their education must be handed over to testing companies, charter operators, and ed tech corporations. This disastrous trend resulted in huge parent protests and hundreds of thousands of students opting out of state exams last spring.

The current Senate bill is admittedly far from perfect. It still requires annual standardized tests in grades 3-8, as did NCLB. It would allot far too many federal dollars and too little accountability to charter schools, while encouraging merit pay for teachers – all policies likely to lead to wasted taxpayer funds that would be better spent on programs proven to work, such as class size reduction. It would do nothing to protect student data privacy, while allowing the continued disclosure of sensitive personal information to vendors and other third parties without parental knowledge or consent. Hopefully this critical issue will be addressed separately by Congress, by improving one or more of the many student privacy bills introduced during the past few months.

Yet ECAA still represents a critical step forward, because it places an absolute ban on the federal government intervening in the decision-making of states and districts as to how to judge schools, evaluate teachers or implement standards. In particular, it expressly bars the feds from requiring or even incentivizing states to adopt any particular set of standards, as Duncan has done with the Common Core, through his Race to the Top grants and NCLB waivers.

It would also bar the feds from requiring that teachers be judged by student test scores, which is not only statistically unreliable according to most experts, but also damaging to the quality of education kids receive, by narrowing the curriculum and encouraging test prep to the exclusion of all else. The bill would prevent the feds from imposing any particular school improvement strategy or mandating which schools need improvement – now based simplistically on test scores, no matter what the challenges faced by these schools or the inappropriateness of the measure. Finally, the bill would prevent the feds from withholding funds from states that allow parents to opt out of testing, as Duncan most recently threatened to do to the state of Oregon.

It is true that many states have already drunk the Common Core/testing Koolaid, led by Governors and legislators influenced by the deep pockets of corporate reformers or tempted by RTTT funds. ECAA also still requires annual testing, which the Tester amendment would replace with grade-span testing, as many organizations including FairTest and Network for Public Education have strongly urged. (Full disclosure: I’m on NPE’s board.) The bill has a provision aimed at alleviating over-testing, by requiring that states audit the number of standardized exams and eliminate duplication, though it’s not clear how effective this requirement will be.

But with or without the Tester amendment, ECAA would release the stranglehold that the federal government currently has on our schools, and would allow each of us to work for more sane and positive policies in our respective states and districts. For this reason alone, it deserves the support of every parent and teacher who cares about finally moving towards a more humane, and evidence-based set of practices in our public schools.  

Categories Common Core, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education
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