Obama’s Call to Cap Standardized Testing: Is it Better?
When President Obama announced on October 24 that he wanted schools to spend no more than two percent of instructional time on standardized testing, it seemed like the announcement educators had been waiting for since he took office in 2008.
Critics, though, think Congressional action could make testing situations worse.
Instead of reversing the No Child Left Behind Act, as many had hoped, the Obama administration reinforced the country’s focus on standardized testing by linking federal subsidies to states’ implementations of Common Core standards for testing K–12 content knowledge. More and more, school communities are complaining about the increasing infringement of mandatory testing on instructional time.
It makes sense, then, that when the U.S. Department of Education released its Testing Action Plan, American Federation of Teachers union president Randi Weingarten found hope in Obama’s call for Congress to enforce his two percent clause. “Parents, students, educators,” she said, “your voice matters and was heard.”
Why Two Percent
Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post asked where two percent came from. The answer, ironically, is New York — a state where 20 percent of students opted out of standardized testingthis year, even after Governor Andrew Cuomo had already signed into law in 2014 that no student would spend more than two percent of class time taking standardized tests — one percent for state-level tests, and one percent for district-level tests. His former commissioner of education, John King, will succeed Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education at the end of this year.
A recent report from The Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives at SUNY New Paltz surveyed New York state teachers for grades three through eight about how many instructional minutes they spent preparing students for standardized tests. Time on Test: The Fixed Costs of 3–8 Standardized Testing in New York State examined actual testing time in combination with the “fixed costs” of testing, defined as the necessary process of making possible the conditions for test taking: fulfilling administrative tasks, providing necessary accommodations for students, and reading the directions students need in order to understand what is required of them.
By taking into account the fixed costs of testing with the actual time spent taking the test, the study found that “on average, 185 minutes are dedicating to testing in grades 3–6 and 189 minutes in grades 7–8 during the administration of each daily exam,” which comes to a yearly Does Obama’s Call to Cap Standardized Tests Really Matter? | Articles | Noodle: