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UFT: K-2 testing pilot a ‘bad idea’
Sep 12, 2008 3:44 PM
Share your crayons, wash your hands before snack time, open your booklets and take a 60-minute assessment test.
The Department of Education’s plan to give standardized tests to children as young as kindergartners has sparked outrage among parents and teachers already concerned that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are too focused on standardized testing in measuring school progress.
UFT President Randi Weingarten called the plan a bad idea.
“Anything involving testing can eventually mean high stakes decisions for children and teachers,” she said. “There’s a right place and a wrong place for testing, and this is the wrong place.”
An e-mail message sent to elementary school principals by DOE Chief Accountability Officer James Liebman on Aug. 25 urged them to sign on to a yearlong pilot program for K-2 students that would offer five testing options. These include timed assessment tests in English and math requiring students to record answers in booklets for anywhere from 40 minutes to 90 minutes, and another that would have teachers entering observations of individual kids into Palm Pilots.
The $400,000 experiment asks for voluntary participants and claims to measure children’s progress, not rank them.
Liebman defended the plan, saying that K-2 classes are already being assessed by other methods. He said that principals may be able to return to using preferred tests after the pilot period, or the city may mandate a single text to be used next year depending on the results. He added that in the future the K-2 scores may be used as part of overall report cards or maybe not. Liebman said that scores could be used for making comparisons between classrooms easier.
“Testing children at such as early age is developmentally unsound, putting academic pressure on them just as they are becoming comfortable with school,” Weingarten said. “Also once the information is available, the potential exists for adminstrators to use it to make premature assessments, which will be tempting now that schools in New York City are being graded.”
In justifying its decision, DOE officials told the Daily News in an Aug. 28 article that the UFT Elementary Charter School assessed its 1st- and 2nd-graders.
“Of course we use assessment measures to identify children’s strengths and weaknesses to help them and to build strong foundations,” said UFT Vice President Aminda Gentile, chief academic officer of the UFT Elementary Charter School.
But, she added, “We do not use them to generate scores or letter grades to compare students or classrooms. Our youngest children should not be subjected to high-stakes tests. Any teacher knows that. The DOE should not head down that path.”
At press time, only 50 of the city’s 700-plus elementary principals expressed interest in the plan.
