How Duncan’s teacher reprieve aids students, Common Core, tests
Test: It’s just a four-letter word for measuring skill, knowledge, intelligence, capacities, or aptitude.
In public education lately, test has become another kind of four-letter word: one associated with stressed out students, angry parents and teachers fearful of losing their jobs.
Testing has such a negative connotation that in New York City alone this year, nearly 2,000 families formally opted their children out of standardized tests.
Sydney Morris and Evan Stone
If left to fester, this trend of anxiety and frustration will strip our schools and educators of one their most efficient tools. When done well, tests provide essential feedback about student performance and ability, helping educators focus their instruction and reflect on their practice.
In our own classrooms as public elementary school teachers, we strived to create a culture where tests were an opportunity to exhibit mastery, identify concepts that needed more instruction, and understand which students needed additional support. We also saw them as an assessment of how well we were doing as teachers.
As educators, we believed in creating a culture of shared accountability — our students’ success was our success.
“By ‘taking a deep breath’ as Duncan has done and using the next year to improve the quality of the assessments, we can make ‘test’ just another four-letter word again.”
Unfortunately, the current testing climate has created outright fear and panic. Our organization has hosted conversations with thousands of educators around the country who share this sentiment and tell us it is caused not by a fundamental opposition to the use of tests, but by a confluence of numerous educational shifts at the same time.
Educators are beginning to teach to the new, more challengingCommon Core State Standards. Students are being measured on new tests aligned to these standards, and for the first time, teachers’ evaluations now include their students’ growth from these new tests. Many educators feel How Duncan’s teacher reprieve aids students, Common Core, tests | The Hechinger Report:
