Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests - Rethinking Schools

Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests - Rethinking Schools

Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests

One month after taking office, the Biden administration faced its first major education policy test. It failed miserably. 

Despite a campaign promise to end standardized testing in public schools (See “Biden’s Broken Promise: Time to Opt Out!” by Denisha Jones), on Feb. 22 administration officials declared it would not grant “blanket waivers of assessments” for the current school year despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The announcement drew immediate grassroots protest that clogged U.S. Education Department (ED) phone lines and ensured that students returning to classrooms after a year of trauma and chaos would face hours of useless standardized tests mandated by the federal government.

The decision also set in motion a state-by-state battle around testing that is now underway, and reopened fault lines in the Democratic Party over education policy that were papered over during the campaign against Trump. 

One year ago, as the pandemic swept the country, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos granted testing waivers to all 50 states. The move  instantly underscored the educational irrelevance of the tests and their existence as an obstacle to serving the real needs of students.

As Biden pushed to reopen schools during his first 100 days, pressure built for a renewal of the testing waivers. A growing number of states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, South Carolina, and Georgia announced plans to seek them while the education world awaited confirmation of Miguel Cardona, the Connecticut state superintendent Biden nominated for education secretary.

But just days before Cardona’s confirmation, Acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum released a letter declaring that all states would be required to give the tests mandated by the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (also known as the “Every Student Succeeds Act”). Rosenblum came to Biden’s education policy team directly from Education Trust, the pro-testing corporate reform lobby that until late April was led by John King, a longtime, pro-testing proponent who succeeded Arne Duncan as secretary of education in the Obama Administration.

For months, pro-testing corporate reformers had worked to head off calls for another round of testing waivers. Mass standardized testing is the engine of corporate education reform and its supporters feared a second year without scores could permanently weaken the testing CONTINUE READING: Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests - Rethinking Schools

Education Matters: DCPS's testing shenanigans

Education Matters: DCPS's testing shenanigans

DCPS's testing shenanigans

A lot of schools are doing a new testing regimen. In years past, an entire class would test all at once, but now higher achievers are testing first and lower performers sometime after. My initial thought was the district is trying to pull a fast one. The district knows kids talk, so the thought is maybe some could pass on some info to their peers, that and teachers just want to be helpful too. Now I don't see any teacher saying the answer to 26 is C, but if they see a subject on the test that could be covered a little more before the lower performing group took the test, that would be okay too. That's what I initially thought anyways.

Then somebody pointed out that it was being done so the lower performing kids could get more instruction. I can rationalize that, okay, sure why not. The district isn't some evil despot with plots within plots but maybe not so fast.

However, now I am learning that many of the "lower kids" aren't getting extra instruction because their teachers are proctoring the tests. A friend at the district pointed some more things out to me the district probably hasn't considered because "it seems like they look at every kid like they are dollar signs and test scores" instead of, well, instead of them being kids.  

Isn't it going to be a kick in the pants when some kids realize they are the lower performers as they take the tests after their peers? Many of these kids experience test weariness; that is, there are diminishing returns CONTINUE READING: Education Matters: DCPS's testing shenanigans

Yong Zhao and William McDiarmid: Time to Rethink Standardized Testing | Diane Ravitch's blog

Yong Zhao and William McDiarmid: Time to Rethink Standardized Testing | Diane Ravitch's blog

Yong Zhao and William McDiarmid: Time to Rethink Standardized Testing

Two friends got together to address an important topic for readers of the blog. Yong Zhao is a much-published international scholar based at the University of Kansas. Bill McDiarmid is Dean Emeritus of the College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

They write:

COVID-19 has disrupted schooling in its traditional sense. It has also disrupted other school related activities such as state standardized testing. As schools return to “normal” thanks to vaccination, many states are already pushing to resume standardized testing as part of the “normal” operations of formal education and to assess the so-called “learning loss” (Zhao, 2021). Resuming standardized testing is perhaps one of the worst things that can happen to children, especially after more than a year of social isolation and unprecedented disruption.

Standardized testing in schools has been criticized repeatedly for multiple reasons. A decade and a half ago CONTINUE READING: Yong Zhao and William McDiarmid: Time to Rethink Standardized Testing | Diane Ravitch's blog