The Obama Administration’s (Smoke and Mirrors) Calls for “Less Testing”
For those of you who have not yet heard, last weekend the Obama Administration released a new “Testing Action Plan” in which the administration calls for a “decreased,” “curbed,” “reversed,” less “obsessed,” etc. emphasis on standardized testing for the nation. The plan, headlined as such, has hit the proverbial “front pages” of many news (and other) outlets since. See, for example, articles in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, CNN, US News & World Report,Education Week, and the like.
The gist of the “Testing Action Plan” is that student-level tests, when “[d]one poorly, in excess, or without clear purpose…take valuable time away from teaching and learning, draining creative approaches from our classrooms.” It is about time the federal government acknowledges this, officially, and kudos to them for “bear[ing] some of the responsibility for this” throughout the nation. However, they also assert that testing is, nevertheless, still essential as long as tests “take up the minimum necessary time, and reflect the expectation that students will be prepared for success.”
What is this “necessary time” of which they speak?
They set the testing limits for all states not to exceed 2%. More specifically, they, “recommend that states place a cap on the percentage of instructional time students spend taking required statewide standardized assessments to ensure that… [pause marker added] no child spends more than 2 percent of her classroom time taking these tests [emphasis added].” Notice the circumlocution here as per No Child Left Behind(NCLB) — that which substantively helped bring us to become such a test-crazed nation in the first place.
When I first heard this, though, the first thing I did was pull out my trusty calculator to The Obama Administration’s (Smoke and Mirrors) Calls for “Less Testing” | VAMboozled!: