Teachers’ Unions Reasserting Themselves With Push Against Standardized Testing
In Florida, the teachers’ union has lobbied to limit the use of standardized tests, and the governor last week signed a bill that limits the number of hours students can spend taking them.
The union in New Jersey financed an advertising campaign in which a grim-faced father talks about his son crying because of tests.
And in New York, where local unions have worked closely with parent groups that oppose testing, the president of the state union went so far as to urge parents to opt out of the annual tests, which began last week.
After several years in which teachers’ unions have been hammered on the issue of tenure, have lost collective bargaining rights in some states and have seen their evaluations increasingly tied to student scores, they have begun, with some success, to reassert themselves using a bread-and-butter issue: the annual tests given to elementary and middle school students in every state.
The teachers’ push on testing comes as Congress is debating how to revise the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, which requires that schools demonstrate annual progress on test scores and prescribed measures for schools deemed failing, from mandatory tutoring to closing. Lawmakersare considering a bill that removes the most punitive consequences for schools and makes clear that states do not have to use test scores to evaluate teachers.
rallies; petition drives; showings of “Standardized,” a documentary critical of testing; and sessions telling parents they have a right to keep their children from taking tests, as tens of thousands of parents around the country have done.
“Does it give us a platform?” said Karen E. Magee, the president of the New York State United Teachers. “Absolutely.”
Her union began agitating more vocally against testing after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, denouncing an evaluation system in which 96 percent of teachers received good ratings, proposed increasing the weight of test scores in teacher evaluations. The union argued that it was not fair to make test scores so big a part of a teacher’s rating because many factors outside the classroom can influence scores.
Although the State Legislature ultimately settled on a compromise, the union seemed to win the public relations battle. Polls found that more voters sided with the teachers’ union over education policies than with Mr. Cuomo.
Ms. Magee urged parents to opt out of the tests to subvert the rating system, though state education officials said districts would have to come up with alternative methods of evaluating teachers who did not have enough test scores.
The union followed up with robocalls to its members, encouraging those with children in the grades that take the tests, third through eighth, to keep their own children out of the exams.
Although official numbers have not yet been released, it is likely that many more parents in New York State are keeping their children out of the tests than did last year, particularly in wealthy suburbs and neighborhoods of New York City. One advocacy group estimated, based on news and parent reports and information from local officials, that more than 150,000 students, or more than 15 percent of the testing grades, sat out the English exams last week. The math exams are being given this week.
Some education officials have tried to rein in teachers who have advocated for opting out. In Rochester, a district official asked principals to identify teachers who had sent emails or made phone calls to parents encouraging them to opt out, or who “you have evidence as utilizing their classrooms as ‘political soapboxes.’” The Florida education commissioner warned that “certain willful opt-out behaviors may warrant disciplinary action” against teachers.
Around the country, individual union leaders are approaching the issue with varying levels of fervor. Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, and Randi Weingarten, president of the other major teachers’ group, the American Federation of Teachers, say they support parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized tests but have not gone as far as Ms. Magee and some local chapters in encouraging parents to do so.
In Kentucky, where the education commissioner has said parents do not Teachers’ Unions Reasserting Themselves With Push Against Standardized Testing - NYTimes.com:
