NEA’s new president denounces testing
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| CREDIT: NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION | Newly elected National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García addresses delegates at the union's national convention in Denver in July. |
In the midst of her first swing through California, the incoming president of the National Education Association praised the Common Core State Standards and California’s measured approach in implementing them while warning that the nation’s largest teachers union would fight efforts to use the new tests for the standards in ways that “harm kids” and punish schools and teachers.
A former elementary school teacher and Utah Teacher of the Year, Lily Eskelsen García, 59, has scheduled events with teachers and the news media today in Los Angeles and the Bay Area later in the week. She takes charge of the 3-million-member union next month.
“I was impressed with Common Core,” Eskelsen García said in a telephone interview this week, and found “nothing sinister” about the standards. But she said she share the concerns of many of her friends and colleagues, who predict that in many states the new tests, like the Smarter Balanced assessment that California will give, will be used to declare schools failing and hold students back a year – “one more test that means very little with big consequences and punishments.”
California is different, she said, because, unlike New York, another heavily Democratic state, it didn’t hastily develop poorly designed Common Core tests and hold teachers and schools accountable for the results before teachers were trained in the standards.
“California said, ‘All right. The standards seem to be OK, but we are going to take it one step at a time. We are going to call a moratorium on any high-stakes consequences. We’re going take time to train people … to align the curriculum,’” Eskelsen García said, referring to a one-year hiatus, possibly longer, on giving tests not required by the federal government. And, she said, California is taking its time in deciding “what really makes sense in terms of consequences” for the standards and how to assess them.
The Smarter Balanced tests will be given for the first time next spring. Test designers say the new tests will measure critical thinking and problem solving. If, however, they turn out to be another multiple-choice test, “it will be a disaster of Biblical proportions,” Eskelsen NEA’s new president denounces testing | EdSource:
