Was High-Stakes Testing 2015’s Biggest Loser?
In October, President Obama announced that the Department of Education would betaking steps to limit standardized testing in schools. The proposal was a little short on specifics but the fact that the administration was conceding that rampant overtesting was a problem – for which it “bears some of the responsibility,” Obama said – was striking because it was confirmation how far the tide had turned.
Opposition to high-stakes testing had been building for some time, ever since No Child Left Behind was enacted more than a decade ago, but 2015 proved to be a watershed year. Led by educators and parents, the movement to reduce standardized testing notched up critical victories in state legislatures, school boards, and in Washington, D.C., and has been instrumental in the media’s heightened scrutiny of the effects of overtesting. There’s a lot of work to be done in the years ahead, but it is undeniable that in 2015, educators and parents made a compelling case to end the high-stakes testing madness and bring real teaching and learning back to the classroom – and lawmakers took notice.
1. Public Opinion Hardens Against Standardized Testing. Survey after survey in 2015 – both national and state – revealed a public increasingly fed up with the amount of testing and the overreliance of test scores in evaluating students, schools and teachers. The 2015 PDK Gallup poll found that 65 percent of parents believed high-stakes testing was being misused and only 14 percent said it was “ an important factor” in gauging the effectiveness of a public school. AYouGuv/Economist poll released in April revealed that majorities believed students take too many standardized tests and that they have done more harm than good. The public supports assessments but the egregious amount of time spent on testing and test prep, the crowding out of instruction time and the impact it has on their children has alienated the vast majority of the public, leaving the guardians of the status quo with little cover to defend the system.
2. Exit No Child Left BehindThe enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, the sixth reauthorization of theElementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) ushered in the high-stakes testing era, almost tripling the number of federally mandated tests for K-12 students from 6 to 17. The law was praised by members of both political parties at the time as an antidote to a perceived deficit of standards and accountability in public schools. Intentions may have been good, but the law unleashed ruinous “test and punish” policies that mandated struggling schools to meet narrow test-based criteria (so-called Adequate Yearly Progress) or face punishment – without providing the necessary resources and supports. For an entire generation of students and educators, NCLB corrupted what it meant to teach and learn, and by 2012, attention in Washington turned to replacing it. Throughout the year, educators waged an unprecedented mobilization and advocacy campaignon behalf of the nation’s students to persuade Congress to prioritize real learning and opportunity over the failed policies of NCLB.
It took a while, but the new ESEA, the Every Student Succeeds Act , was passed by both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Obama this week. Although it keeps annual testing in place, the new law strips the federal government of its NCLB mandates, including AYP. It also gives individual states flexibility in determining how much time should be spent on testing, streamlining and improving existing assessments and designing new accountability measures.
3. States Take the LeadLong before ESSA passed, educators had been working with parents and other stakeholders in states to scale back the amount of testing, prioritize more time for teaching and create new authentic Was High-Stakes Testing 2015's Biggest Loser? - NEA Today:
