When we last reported on accountability run amok, I had just listened to a tale of woe from a New York City parent whose son was reduced to tears on the occasion of the English Language Arts (ELA) exam. I lamented this torturous rite of passage, of course, but we were talking about a third-grader.
These days, —and they’re not at the water table. The Daily News got it right: “They don’t even know how to hold a pencil yet, but kindergartners are getting a taste of the tough side of education with Common Core standardized math tests.” Particularly chilling was the observation of one Queens teacher, whose pupils tried to help each other during the test she administered earlier this fall: “Sharing is not caring anymore,” she said, bluntly noting that “developmentally, it’s not the right thing to do.”
I’ll say.
Samuel Meisels, who recently left his post as head of the Erikson Institute, and now works with the Buffetts in Nebraska, has been sounding the alarm for decades. In 1989, when my son entered first grade, Meisels, the creator of , railed against the for kindergarten assessment as the “reductio and absurdum of high-stakes testing, where an entire state has transferred control over its early education program to a single group-administered paper-and-pencil test.” And this was back in the days before based on students’ test scores had yet to become the silver bullet du jour.
But we’re not in Kansas anymore, and parents of our youngest learners are worried. Late last week, an email arrived from Emma Frank, mother of two, including a first-grader at , a K-5 school in Washington Heights led by progressive educator Julie Zuckerman. After a school-wide decision to opt out of K-1 testing, Frank was calling each member of the city council (“I’m up to ‘G,’ she wrote), to protest the policy. She also passed along the following letter, written by Don Lash, to state-level officials, which she is circulating as fast as she can:
Dear Assembly Member Nolan and Senator Flanagan:
I am contacting you because I am the parent of a first grade student who is expected to take a multiple choice standardized test as a result of a policy directive from the New York State Education Department (NYSED) that students from Kindergarten to 2nd grade be tested using an exam mandated by NYSED.
The test is not intended to reveal any information that would be used to improve instruction to my child, but would be used solely to evaluate her teachers. Having seen some of the sample testing material published in news accounts, which was developed by the for-profit testing conglomerate PearsonEd, I don’t believe the test has any validity in assessing the quality of her instruction or the level of mastery of the curriculum. Moreover, I deeply resent the intrusion on her learning time that would be required to master test-taking skills that would serve no purpose beyond the test.
Finally, my child is in a dual language program, with some students acquiring English as a second language and others acquiring Spanish as a second language. The test was developed and normed in English, so it would be worse than useless in evaluating the performance of my child’s teachers. I have exercised my right to opt out of this pointless testing, but I am nevertheless concerned that if my child’s teachers and the administrators of the school are forced to administer a test with no educational value, her instruction time will be reduced whether she takes the test or not.
As a taxpayer, I object to the diversion of funds into Pearson’s or any other developer’s coffers, and the waste of the time of teachers and other school personnel, time that could be dedicated to teaching and learning. I am requesting that as chairs of the Assembly and Senate Education Committees, with oversight responsibility for NYSED, you demand that Commissioner King reverse this ill-considered and poorly implemented policy.
