UFT President Michael Mulgrew on Oct. 29 blasted the city Department of Education for giving children in 2nd grade and younger standardized tests replete with bubble-in answer sheets for multiple-choice questions.

“It has to be banned. It is crazy what is going on,” Mulgrew testified before a state Senate committee. “Some of these young children can’t even hold a pencil yet; that is why they make fat crayons.”

Two weeks later, the UFT in concert with a range of other education-advocacy groups launched a petition drive calling for a ban on standardized testing in pre-K through 2nd grade.

In the same testimony, Mulgrew sharply criticized the state and city rollout of the Common Core Learning Standards, warning that support for the new standards is plummeting among his members because the implementation has been so poor.

“The rollout has been horrible,” he testified. “I fear we as a state are in danger of losing something that is very important to the children of the state.”

Mulgrew reiterated the union’s call for a moratorium on attaching high-stakes consequences to state tests until the implementation issues have been resolved.

He reaffirmed his support for the state’s adoption of the Common Core Learning Standards and the skills that the standards demand. “But we do not have a curriculum,” he told the senators. Commercially prepared programs that schools around the city have adopted this year were assembled in haste and are not fully aligned to the Common Core, he said.

“It’s like the perfect storm,” he said. “The Common Core should have been separated from the evaluation because now teachers and parents think the Common Core is the culprit. The school system has not taken responsibility for what it needs to do.”

Mulgrew proposed that the state step back and devote a year to organizing a statewide curriculum-writing project. As of now, he said, schools still lack even promised workbooks and materials. And the available curricula do not provide the scaffolding to help students master the new skills. “The children are being asked to demonstrate the standard on Day One,” he said.

State Sen. John Flanagan, who chairs the committee, asked Mulgrew if the UFT supported the adoption of a statewide curriculum.

What he would like to see, Mulgrew responded, is fully developed curricula, available to all school districts, which they can then customize for their own districts. As of now, districts purchase commercial curricula on their own, which he called “a colossal waste of taxpayer funds.”

Deputy Schools Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, whose testimony followed Mulgrew’s, tried to blame the State Education Department, saying he planned to ask the state for flexibility to exempt students up to 2nd grade from “bubble” tests.