Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates?
Many were recently disappointed by the lack of conversation about K-12 education in the recent Democratic debate in Las Vegas. The Progressive Magazine asked me to reflect on the dearth of coverage. I wrote.
The recent Democratic Party presidential debate in Las Vegas left many observers scratching their heads. Why did the candidates and their CNN hosts ignore K-12 education?
Is education not important enough to merit discussion as a top national priority in 2016? The public clearly cares about education. US News reportsthat education is the third ranked search term on Google. When Gallup askedan open-ended question on the most important issues to voters in the 2016 campaign, education came in sixth.
We know that education is important to the public. What issues do voters identify as most important? A recentpoll found that “less testing” was tied with “parental involvement” for the most important issue.
High-stakes tests came to the nation with the passage of No Child Left Behind during the presidency of George W. Bush. The tests were framed as education reform. However, high-stakes tests were born in China to sort and stratify society. Thus, high-stakes testing is not a new educational reform. China has used tests to sort their society for more than 1500 years!
Closer to home, for about 100 years, high-stakes tests have been used to sort and track students in the United States. Tests were spurred early on by the racist Eugenics movement. The Seattle NAACP recently quoted W.E.B Du Bois, Co-founder of the NAACP
It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [first] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates? — NAACP Now — Medium: