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One Multiple Choice, One Essay, and a Chance at Better Schools

President Barack Obama will lift the worst of the requirements in the federal school-testing law. Will it help in Pelham?

Okay, get a tight grip on your No. 2 pencil. Knuckles white? Here’s your first question. Who said:

"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."

* Jon Stewart
* Will Rogers
* Roy Rogers
* Stephen Cobert

Pencils up. Okay, did you get it right? The correct answer was Will Rogers, speaking in 1929. Now, I’ll try the essay portion and you can respond with your five-paragraph essay, or at the very least a DBQ, in the box below. But wait! I’ve lost my topic sentence. It was right here. Darn, darn, darn. Oh, got it, there it is: When is legislative quagmire in Washington, that train wreck on the Potomac, good for our kids?

Easy, when President Barack Obama moves to lift the the worst burdens of the test-equals-reform system imposed by the No Child Left Behind law, which I will always refer to as No Child Left Untested. The president did that two weeks ago after Congress, particularly the House, refused to move on the needed re-authorization of No Child Left Untested.

Let me be clear, testing fans: This not about accountability, proficiency, fixing failing schools, or most certainly, improving your child’s education. The law set tests up as a false god. If we just tested kids and tested kids and tested kids, schools would get better. There’s three things wrong with this.

First, the testing has nothing to do with an individual child’s education. These tests measure buildings and districts (and soon teachers). Our kids are little data engines, employed to generate the numbers, but not benefiting from them directly. In fact, they are hurt because with buildings at risk, teaching-to-the-test rules in the effort to boost building numbers, not aid individual learners. (Third, fourth and fifth graders in Pelham all get Measuring Up workbooks for the math and English tests, 300 pages of test cram separate from the texts in those subjects. Their time could be better spent.)

Second, the law says that by 2014, schools must test for proficiency at the rate of 100 percent. Now I know a little statistics, I’ve seen the bell curve and I’ve lived life. No system produces anything at a rate of 100 percent. But the law posits that the path to improvement is to test every year with that gun at your back while you run straight at that cliff. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently warned that without change, 80 percent of schools would not make the so-called adequate yearly progress this year. And so they’d be labeled as failing. How fun for the kids is that? Because failure, like cliffs and guns, is such a motivator.

Third, and most problematic, the testing ignores the massive changes we need to start making in the way we educate. I’ve written several columns on the, and that are out there, and I’ll sprinkle links to them here. For extra credit, you start writing a list of the things you think we need that testing won’t purchase. Better teachers, and so better teacher education and pay? Improved ways to assess educators and hire and fire? Equity in school financing? Solve childhood poverty (I’m serious; that is the biggest drag on achievement by far, not grasping urban teachers unions)? No Child Left Untested put testing in the center ring and stuck real school improvement, the revolution we need, in the sideshow.

Now, I probably should have used “may,” “could” or “probably” in my topic sentence, but I know how those graders think, and I’m going for my number. President Obama did not do away with the tests; he can’t. He said the Education Department will waive the 2014 deadline and other requirements in exchange for states providing new standards for college and career readiness, promising to focus on the 15 percent of schools at the bottom and developing new ways to assess teachers. (By the way, will we ever have enough standards? I mean, I could send in mine for Patrick in the fifth grade on an index card, if that would cut back on the meetings.)

The president got rid of the gun and the cliff, but not the tests. Pelham kids in third through eighth grades will still take math and English tests every year, with one more in high school. Will that improve things here? New York State, as expected, will have to ask for the waiver, and then make the right noises about what it means. And then we will have to actually stop annually asking why this number in this grade in this building, or that in the other, and focus on the real ways we can improve our six schools. That will be the real test.


Rich blogs at richzahradnik.com.

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