around the uft
'Fixation' on high-stakes testing sparks debate
May 11, 2006 12:30 PM
District 31 Representative Emil Pietromonaco (left) meets with City Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson, who moderated the forum on Staten Island.
Parents, community activists and UFT members expressed sharply divided views over the Department of Education’s high-stakes testing policy at a recent Staten Island forum co-sponsored by St. John’s University and 31 IDEAL, a coalition of parents, community activists and UFT members.
Many of the speakers echoed a theme sounded by UFT President Randi Weingarten in a recent letter to The New York Times in which she deplored the “fixation” on high-stakes testing.
Jennifer Giovinazzo, a 4th-grade teacher at PS 14, was a panelist at a recent forum on high-stakes testing.
Jennifer Giovinazzo, for example, a 4th-grade teacher at PS 14 on
Staten Island, said that the DOE’s high-stakes testing policy hurts the
kids she teaches because too much instructional time is siphoned off
for “teaching to the test” at the expense of other subjects.
Another
panelist, Jane Hirschmann, founder of Time Out From Testing, is a
fierce antagonist of the DOE’s testing regimen. She argued that the
city’s accelerated emphasis on testing and teaching to the test has
failed to raise academic standards and has actually become a substitute
for legitimate curriculum.
Hirschmann said that high-stakes tests are notoriously fallible, are not aligned to actual learning standards and have led to damaging labeling and tracking of children. For these reasons, she said, many in the academic community are opposed to them.
Robert Tobias, a former Board of Education testing expert and now the director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, did not condemn the use of these tests outright. But Tobias said the excessive reliance on them and their exaggerated role as a tool of accountability are not helpful.
Tobias said the purpose of testing is defeated when the definition of effective teaching becomes having students meet the challenge of the test rather than meet the challenge of learning the material being tested.
Fred Bost, director of assessment at the Educational Testing Service, said high-stakes testing is misunderstood and there would be less resistance to it if there were greater awareness of its scientific foundation and objectives.
UFT District 31 Representative Emil Pietromonaco, a member of 31 IDEAL, said most of the educators he meets believe that tests can be a vital tool when “they are the right test given the right way for the right reason.”
Pietromonaco said there was agreement among most panelists that checks and balances must protect against the supremacy of a single test and that it is more urgent to learn than to be tested.
PS 60 teacher Sean Rotkowitz asks a question.
Joan McKeever-Thomas, the UFT parent outreach coordinator on Staten Island, was one of the coordinators of the event held on the Staten Island campus of St. John’s. The forum was moderated by Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council’s Education Committee.
