NYC Public School Parents: SLT calls for moratorium on high-stakes testing in New York State

NYC Public School Parents: SLT calls for moratorium on high-stakes testing in New York State:

SLT calls for moratorium on high-stakes testing in New York State

by Molly

Here is a letter from the Brooklyn New School Leadership Team, calling on a moratorium on high-stakes testing in NYS. If your SLT would like to sign on, contact Liza Featherstone at lfeather@panix.com.


We, the Brooklyn New School Leadership Team, call for a moratorium on high-stakes testing in New York State. 

As parents and educators, we don’t object to assessment, when used properly. As currently practiced in grades 3-8, however, New York’s testing program is narrowing the curriculum and, often, unfairly punishing teachers for good teaching. It’s also a huge waste of money. This is unacceptable and our children deserve better.

No credible researchers believe that tying student test scores to teacher evaluations makes any sense. There are too many variables: did a child eat breakfast? What is her family income? Is she bored when taking this test? And there are, in any case, too few children involved to tease out any statistical trends; while standardized tests may be a fine way to see how, for example, kids in the United States fare at math compared to kids in Singapore, they tell us little about how teacher A compares to teacher B, since one or two kids will dramatically alter the average.

Attempts to measure student progress by test scores are further muddied by the fact that the tests change so