Here's what I sent them:
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Nearly
two decades of high-stakes testing have left Delaware’s public schools with a
legacy of failure.
I
co-chaired the Governor’s Social Studies Curriculum Frameworks Commission from
1992-95. Our commission included teachers,
parents, students, administrators, academics, and business partners. All commissions held public meetings, engaging
in deliberations to create “world class standards” in English, Math, Science,
and Social Studies. We did our job well
enough that many of those standards remain in place today.
Those
standards were designed to be tested via “performance assessment,” but the
General Assembly thought individualized testing cost too much. Instead, they approved the DSTP, which lacked
reliability and validity; failed to assess all the standards; and was compromised
by backroom politics from day one. DSTP
was high-stakes: students who failed could
not be promoted to the next grade without summer school and retaking the test.
As
the first legislators’ and donors’ kids failed, student accountability evaporated.
Under
No Child Left Behind, consequences migrated to the schools, rated via a complex
system of “cells” that often left Annual Yearly Progress for each building determined
by test scores of a handful of students.
One elementary school repeatedly failed AYP due to the scores of
profoundly handicapped children who never entered the building, but lived in
that feeder pattern. School districts employed
full-time managers to challenge attendance patterns and force failing scores to
be credited to other districts.
When
the US Department of Education announced waivers to exit this insane system,
Delaware got in line.
Meanwhile,
DCAS replaced DSTP, and SBA is now replacing DCAS. If you don’t comprehend the acronyms, don’t
worry: they’ll change again.
Race
to the Top brought Delaware $119 million for data analysis, teacher learning
communities, Common Core, and testing computers. (Simultaneously, the General Assembly cut
reimbursements for transporting homeless children to school.)
Accountability
in high-stakes testing now descended on teachers.
State
bureaucrats generated strict, test-based teacher accountability regimes, while
legislators enacted unprecedented regulations for teacher preparation programs
in our universities.
None
of this actually improved public education, which Governor Jack Markell tacitly
admitted in his State of the State Address: “Only 20% of our kids graduate from
high school ready for college or a career.”
Content
standards and standardized tests have their place in education, but high-stakes
testing has proven not merely ineffective, but also potentially harmful.
Pursuing
the idea that moving the consequence to this
group, or changing to that test will
abruptly erase the socio-economic disparities dogging public education has
wasted critical resources. In Delaware
alone, hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars and tens of thousands of teacher
preparation hours have not been spent placing great programs at inner-city
schools, providing full funding for special needs students, or turning lose the
individual creativity of classroom teachers. Resources devoted to music, the
arts, the humanities, physical education, and special needs have declined.
Here’s
a modest plan for returning to sanity:
First,
exempt special needs students on IEPs from standardized testing that often
traumatizes them and rarely returns valuable data.
Second,
accept the unanimous recommendation from teacher representatives in the
Delaware State Education Association and legislate a parental “opt-out” from
standardized testing.
Third,
revisit the adoption of Common Core.
Research indicates that content standards should not be so extensive
that they become a de facto curriculum. The breadth of Common Core—all arguments
about quality placed to the side—is too wide to leave room for instructional
depth or teacher creativity. We need a
Delaware process, driven by your child’s teachers and not political/corporate
reformers, to re-examine our academic standards.
Finally,
cap testing costs to direct resources back into the classroom. When our poorest schools have access to the
high-quality programs like Gifted & Talented or Odyssey of the Mind that
our suburban schools boast, we can consider new testing expenditures, not
before.
The
money already invested in the high-stakes testing mania is irrevocably lost. Parents, teachers, and voters must now unite to
insure that more good money does not follow the bad.
Send
resources into our classrooms, not new testing computers.
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Steve Newton is Professor of History and Political Science at Delaware State University and the Libertarian candidate for State Representative in the 22nd District.
