Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s

Of all of the absurd and appalling stories that emerged from the standardized test-based school reform movement in the 2010s, there were two that, arguably, best revealed to me how bankrupt and even cruel some of the things policymakers foisted on children could be.

There were, to be sure, plenty of stories in the past decade to choose from — even without going back to the start of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era in 2002, when President George W. Bush (R) signed his signature education law that ushered in an era of school reform based on the scores of standardized tests.

No teacher had been asked to help write NCLB, and the results showed: Schools were labeled as failing and penalized unfairly; many schools sharply limited or dropped teaching key subjects such as history, science and the arts because only math and reading were tested; and test preparation became the focus of the school day in many classrooms. Recess for young kids? No time.

Arne Duncan, education secretary for President Barack Obama from 2009-2015, knew that NCLB had been a failure, but he pursued policies that made standardized testing even more important than before. He wanted states to use the scores to evaluate teachers and principals. And he once proposed evaluating colleges of education in part on how well the students of their graduates performed on — you guessed it — standardized tests.

There were stories about teachers being evaluated on the test scores of students they didn’t have and CONTINUE READING: Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post