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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

NYC Public School Parents: The testing rebellion & opt-out movement in NYC has a supporter -- inside Tweed

NYC Public School Parents: The testing rebellion & opt-out movement in NYC has a supporter -- inside Tweed:


The testing rebellion & opt-out movement in NYC has a supporter -- inside Tweed

Lisa Nielsen

A nationwide backlash has erupted against the obsession with standardized testing.  In February 2012, the Texas Commissioner of Education, Robert Perry, announced that testing had become a "perversion of its original intent.” Over the last year, 86 percent of Texas school boards representing 91 percent of the state’s students, have passed resolutionsagainst the use of high stakes testing. The view is now so mainstream that in his introductory remarks before the Legislature, Joe Straus, the new, conservative GOP Speaker of the Texas House recently announced,

"By now, every member of this house has heard from constituents at the grocery store or the Little League fields about the burdens of an increasingly cumbersome testing system in our schools…Teachers and parents worry that we have sacrificed classroom inspiration for rote memorization. To parents and educators