Testing backlash: Students and parents chaffing at explosion of standardized tests
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When Ethan Rediske was on his deathbed in January of 2014, the state of Florida wanted him to take a standardized exam. A severely disabled 11-year-old, Ethan was blind and mostly deaf. He had never talked or walked and was fed through a tube.
In his final weeks, his special-needs teacher, who had become attached to him and he to her, came to his home to work with him, read to him, and lift his spirits.
But then, in mid-January, the school district said that Ethan needed to take the annual educational progress exam or get a waiver. A simple note from the doctor would not do. The only way Ethan was getting out of the test was if his parents could provide full medical records and evidence of the boy's current physical problems.
And so in Ethan’s final weeks, the family scrambled to file paperwork so he wouldn't have to take the test. The final letter from the hospice to the school was dated Jan. 28. Ethan died on Feb. 7 from complications of cerebral palsy.
“The school had a choice to make,” Ethan’s mother, Andrea Rediske, said. “They could say, ‘We love Ethan. We are so sorry, and don’t worry about this anymore and let his family spend their last days with him in peace.' Or they could insist on the paperwork. They chose the paperwork.”
Ethan’s case is an extreme example of one of the central tensions playing out in America's schools today: how the push for accountability and a noble desire to improve schools in the most underprivileged neighborhoods has resulted in a byzantine system of standardized testing that strikes many as counterproductive.
Florida is ground zero for America’s standardized testing movement, a distinction that reaches back beyond George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind to the state-level reforms of his brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
It was Jeb who pushed through the hard-nosed policy changes that inspired the Obama administration’s $4 billion Race to the Top program, which was announced in 2009 and offers cash incentives for states which adopt test-based school and teacher performance standards. Jeb’s reforms included grading schools based on test scores, requiring passing scores to move to the next grades and performance pay for teachers.
With the 2002 passage of NCLB, the federal government got behind the accountability movement, using the carrot and stick of federal education funds to control state and local education policy to an unprecedented degree. The Obama administration followed the direction set by the Bush White House, imposing stiff requirements for curriculum, testing and teacher accountability.
As states floundered under NCLB's ambitious demands, the Obama administration offered waivers to schools that used standardized tests to measure teacher performance
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