No Child Left Behind: how to end 'teaching to the test' - LA Times:
Editorial
No Child Left Behind: how to end 'teaching to the test'
When U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last year that the incessant focus on testing was “sucking the oxygen” out of public school classrooms, his statement seemed like a pointed criticism of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and of his own long-standing policies. For the last 14 years, the law has pressured public schools to raise scores in math and reading; that in turn has led schools to “teach to the test” — and to administer increasing numbers of interim tests throughout the year, as schools and individual teachers have tried to determine whether students are on track to score well on the all-important year-end exams.
But it turned out that Duncan wasn't saying what critics of No Child Left Behind had hoped: that there should be fewer standardized tests, which are taken annually in grades three through eight and once in high school. Instead, Duncan proposed giving states incentives to get rid of other “redundant and low-quality” exams. The problem is that as long as there are annual high-stakes tests, schools are going to prepare for them with their own tests.
Duncan is right when he says the annual tests provide important information about schools. They should remain a component of the law, along with high standards for what students should learn. The better way to ensure that test prep doesn't replace
creative, stimulating lessons in class is to relax the law's rigid reliance on scores as a measure of school and teacher performance, and to tone down its harshly punitive elements.
For one thing, the Obama administration should drop its insistence that the test scores be used as a major measure in teacher evaluations. That is now the rule in the 43 states — California isn't one of them — that received waivers from No Child Left Behind, and the administration clearly wants to make it a requirement for all states if the law is reauthorized this year. But the value of this approach has not yet been proved, and as long as states show academic progress, the federal government shouldn't interfere in how they go about it.
No Child Left Behind: how to end 'teaching to the test' - LA Times:
