Cuomo’s learning, but he’s not listening
Last week, New York students were again required to take educationally useless standardized tests. Yet on Sunday, I read in the Press that the governor “learns from his mistakes on school reform.”
I continued reading and discovered that arguments against testing are becoming “invalid,” that teachers are “involved” in every question and that they are receiving training to read data from the tests. Nonsense!
The research against testing is as valid as ever — more now that the state has added untimed tests. There is no research to support this change.
What the governor and the commissioner have “learned” is that if they make a change, they can pretend they have been listening. I have been a participant in two different “listening” tours and know they are not listening. They ignore the Common Core Task Force’s recommendation that the tests be reduced from three to two days. Instead, their untimed tests now have some children testing for full days, thereby surpassing New York state’s 1 percent cap on test-taking. They allow schools to bribe students with pizza parties if they take the tests and force small children whose families have opted out, to see their friends being rewarded while they get nothing.
Few teachers are involved in test preparation; most are not even allowed to see the tests. That sometimes leaves us to depend on 8-year-olds to let us know if test questions are inaccurate or inappropriate. What we do know so far this year is that tests continue to contain reading passages far above grade level, some responses contain at least two possible answers, and tests often require prior knowledge that gives advantages to higher socio-economic students.
As for data, how insulting to think that a teacher needs training to interpret a 1, 2, 3 or 4 on a test! Those are the results the teacher receives. And even if the results are speeded up from September back to June, how does that help drive instruction? Students are moving on, and teachers do not even get to see all the questions, let alone see which ones their students have missed.
If state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia were sincere when she says teachers should be given opportunities to be professionals, she would emulate countries that have strong educational reputations. Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor from Finland, tells us that in his nation, “the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.”
We had already been doing the latter, and ironically, when Finland revamped their system, they copied what they saw here in the USA before we forced our teachers to jump through hoops created in collaboration with privatizers.
We need to return to trusting our teachers and believing what these educated professionals tell us about educating our children.