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testing

What teachers have been saying for years about the content on state ELA tests has finally resonated with journalists, professors and even the state education commissioner. After 8th-graders voiced their bewilderment over the questions on this year’s infamous “Hare and the Pineapple” passage, Commissioner John King struck it from the test. The irony here is that the new state tests, launched to fix the problems with the old discredited tests, so far seem no better, maybe worse.

An administration which has “never stopped congratulating itself for ending ‘social promotion’ has created a new program — ‘social graduation,’” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the City Council Committees on Education and Higher Education on Jan. 19.

Test scores for New York City students showed little to no progress between 2009 and 2011 on national exams — even as students in other cities improved — while the racial achievement gaps remain as wide as they were when the mayor first took office, according to new test data released on Dec. 7.

The New York State Education Department (SED) on Dec. 19 released the 2012 grade three through eight assessment guidelines. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “The unimpressive recent results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that the test prep that has taken over much of the class time in our schools has not helped our kids learn. This testing schedule may be better than the one that SED floated earlier, but the underlying issue remains the same: the last thing New York’s kids need is more testing.”

The real needs of graduating seniors are that of social skills: personal responsibility, self-discipline, responsibilities as members of a community, relationships and responsibilities to colleagues and authority figures, ethical and moral awareness, dress and language, and attitudes toward learning and education in general.

The reliance on ever more standardized tests to determine everything from graduation requirements to teacher tenure to school closings is the holy grail of the so-called education “reform” movement, but testing does not improve education. In fact, testing harms education in many ways. Forcing teachers to teach to the test distorts instruction and impoverishes the curriculum.

Reading and math scores on the latest “Nation’s Report Card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP — showed U.S. 4th- and 8th-graders making solid progress in math over the last two decades and thinner gains in reading. But New York State’s 4th-graders defied the national trend in math by losing ground, even as every other state in the country improved.

In 2010 New York State raised the score needed to pass its standardized reading and math tests and new research shows that it needed to make this change. A passing grade on the state’s old Grade 4 ELA test and Grades 4 and 8 math tests were the equivalent of a “below basic” score on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, considered the gold standard in measuring student achievement.