Opinion: N.J. education chief 'is driving a stake through the heart of public education by his maniacal insistence on perpetual testing'
By Frank Breslin
Welcome to New Jersey, Land of Standardized Testing and Education’s Brave New World. Without relentless testing of the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, students cannot hope to survive, let alone prevail, in the Darwinian jungle of this world. So, at least, runs the advertising copy.
Yet, as crucial to survival as these basic skills are, there exists the danger that we can lose our perspective concerning these tests. Amid the incessant drumbeat that the basics alone should be taught and frequently tested, we can neglect the very things to which these basics are basic!
The question, of course, is “Basic to what?” If this question isn’t answered, New Jersey’s students will, indeed, not survive —not because of not learning the basics, but rather, having learned them alone, they needed far more, which they couldn’t get, because it was never offered.
Teaching only the basics is the rankest of follies, since one would be taught only to crawl, but never to run; be given only the building blocks, but no idea of what to do with them; be able to survive, but not know the things worth surviving for.
Yet this is precisely what is occurring in New Jersey today. Chris Cerf, commissioner of education, in essence is saying: “Away with everything except tests and preparing for them! What isn’t tested isn’t important and needn’t be taught! And to make sure that
Florida was one of the early leaders of a group of states developing tests for the Common Core State Standards, and it manages the money for the group, which is funded by a federal grant. Yet House Speaker Will Weatherford and Senate President Don Gaetz want Florida to pull out of the organization and design its own tests. They have not made a compelling argument, and Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett should proceed with caution.
The Common Core State Standards are the next big thing in public education. They have been adopted by Florida and more than 40 other states, and they spell out the types of knowledge and skills students should possess as they advance from kindergarten through high school. The idea is to better prepare students to enter the workforce or attend college, and for those broad standards to be consistent throughout the country. That means there have to be new tests to go with the standards and replace the much maligned FCAT starting in the 2014-15 school year. Ideally, the results of the new tests would enable apples-to-apples comparisons from state to state and replace the patchwork of tests that make it difficult to determine how Florida students compare to their peers in North Carolina or Indiana.
That benefit would be undercut if Florida pulled out of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, and Gaetz, R-Niceville, cite several concerns that