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How Much Student Testing Is Too Much?

How Much Student Testing Is Too Much?

By Renee Schoof, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — If it’s springtime, it must be standardized testing time in schools across the country.

It’s also when the debate over whether students are inundated with too many tests becomes hot.

Experts say testing is up. Parents who want their children to skip the tests say their ranks are growing. Lawmakers say they’re hearing a loud message about too much unnecessary testing.

The Common Core, a set of tougher classroom standards adopted by more than 40 states, has further inflamed the critics.

But new legislation might change the school testing landscape.

Congress will debate education this spring as lawmakers attempt to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the law spelling out the federal role in public education. Passed in 2002, it mandated annual testing and attached severe consequences for schools whose test scores didn’t show enough progress.

A bipartisan agreement in the Senate on its update of the education bill might reduce the pressure to test. It gives states, not Washington, the job of ensuring that schools are doing good work and deciding what to do about those that aren’t.

The legislation “should produce fewer and more appropriate tests,” according to Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Patty Murray (D-WA), chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

That’s still down the road. What’s new this year is that for the first time most states are using new computer-based tests that require more critical thinking.

What’s not are the complaints. Some parents worry that schools base their lesson plans on what the tests focus on. Poor test-takers are at a disadvantage. Critics say too much money is spent on testing. The consequences of failure can mean closed schools, lost jobs, and an impact on student progress.

“We need fewer, better, and fairer assessments,” Susie Morrison, chief education officer and deputy superintendent at the Illinois State Board of Education, said at a recent meeting of state school officials in Washington.

Parents deserve to know how their children are doing, she said. Tests also are needed to help reduce the large numbers of students who graduate from high school but need remedial classes before college.

But not all tests are equally valuable, she said: “Some assessments used by local districts can and should go away, in our opinion.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who wants to maintain the federal role of holding schools accountable for student growth through annual tests, nonetheless has said that students, parents, and teachers have a legitimate complaint where there’s too much testing or test preparation.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools were required to show “adequate yearly progress” or face outside intervention, which could result in school takeovers.

Waivers from the law’s requirements under the Obama administration came with conditions that schools base teacher evaluations partly on test scores.

“There’s always been a group of parents that don’t like testing,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education research center. “I think the reason it’s been brought to a rapid boil lately is because of these teacher evaluations.”

Tests that states require to measure progress in math and reading cover about 20 percent of teachers, Petrilli said. Many states have standardized tests in other subjects so that all teachers can be evaluated by the results.

“It’s not just the assessments that they actually take as part of the state assessment program, it’s the constant benchmarking and practice tests that take up a significant amount of students’ time,” said Scott Placek, president of the Texas Parents’ Educational Rights Network, a coalition of parents and attorneys that supports parents who don’t want their children to take the tests.

In North Carolina, the Governor’s Teacher Advisory Committee recommended ways to alleviate what it called the testing burden on the district level. It also found that the state had reduced the number of required end-of-course tests from ten to three in the past five years and had eliminated other state-required assessments.

Texas and Virginia passed laws that reduced the number of state-required tests.

In Florida, Rosemarie Jensen of Parkland, one of the national administrators of the United Opt Out movement, a group that opposes “test-centric educational practices,” said she’d seen big growth in the last year in the number of parents nationwide who’d been organizing in opposition to the tests and keeping their children from taking them.

In Florida, such groups have grown from a few to 26 this year. A map by Jensen’s group pinpoints parents who report they’ve refused to let their children take the tests. It shows them scattered nationwide.

“This is not a valid way to measure an entire child,” said Jensen, a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher who’s the mother of two high school students. “None of this has anything to do with better education. This is about a lot of money being made on these tests, and on using the tests to grade schools and turn them over to charters and firing teachers and impacting their pay.”

In her own family, Jensen said, her son, a ninth-grader, is a good student but a poor test-taker. Her daughter, a senior, does well on tests.

“Her test scores can mask some not-so-good teachers,” she said. “My son’s make his teachers look bad, and they work so hard with him. That’s not fair.”

Debbie Veney, vice president of government affairs and communications at the Education Trust, an advocacy group that focuses on students of color and those from low-income families, said too many tests were redundant, not aligned to standards, or just not useful.

“However, are tests necessary? Absolutely,” she said. “We believe it’s not enough to simply see what performance levels are. You’ve got to be able to do something when performance levels aren’t where they need to be.”

Stu Silberman, a former school superintendent who’s executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a nonprofit group of advocates in Kentucky, said school districts must find a balance so that they could be accountable to the public without testing too much.

Silberman said he was a big believer in the informal tests teachers used all the time to see how students were doing, such as quizzes. These kinds of checks give teachers the clues they need to plan their lessons, he said.

But when tests get too formal, and too frequent, he said, “then it starts to feel like we’re doing too much.”

Photo: NCinDC via Flickr

Obama, School Officials Talk Education Goals

Obama, School Officials Talk Education Goals

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday found an ally in Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Michael Hanson.

During an hourlong meeting, Obama pitched his education priorities to Hanson and other superintendents. For the school leaders and administration officials now facing some high-stakes legislative struggles, the White House session came at a key time.

“We were reinforcing to him the importance of his continued support,” Hanson said, adding that Obama’s “articulated vision for what goes on in public schools gives us the room to do this very difficult work.”

Hanson is a member of the executive committee of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents 67 districts serving cities that include Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The late morning meeting in the White House’s Roosevelt Room came as part of the Council’s annual legislative conference, a four-day program that features speeches, receptions and briefings. Politically, the timing was apt, as the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic White House are now maneuvering for position across several fronts.

“This is a pretty polarized city,” Hanson said, standing on the driveway outside the West Wing of the White House. “You can feel it when you come here.”

This week, the polarization will intensify when House and Senate budget committees unveil budget resolutions that spell out Republican priorities on everything from education to defense. The House committee members include Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), a staunch conservative whose district stretches from Fresno County in the south to Amador County in the north.

Separately, House GOP leaders have been struggling to pass a bill reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The bill, dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act during the George W. Bush administration, has roiled conservatives critical of the federal government’s role in education, but it has also worried educators who fear funds will be diverted away from the neediest.

After failing to rally a majority on Feb. 27, Republican leaders pulled the bill from the House floor and have not yet rescheduled a vote. The Obama administration has warned that the president would veto the bill, now renamed the Student Success Act.

“We are making too much progress now in terms of graduation rates, improved reading scores, improved math scores, increasing standards, increasing access to the resources the kids need for us to be going backwards now,” Obama said after the meeting with superintendents.

Nationwide, high school graduation rates for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students have increased during the past two years, Education Department records released Monday show. The nation’s overall high school graduation rate reached a record 81.4 percent during the 2012-13 school year.

The Fresno district’s graduation rate of about 76 percent during that school year was somewhat lower than the national average. The other superintendents who met with Obama on Monday, serving cities like Kansas City, Mo., San Francisco and Washington, D.C., struggle with similar challenges.

“The students they work with are largely poor, and they’re largely people of color,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

One specific sticking point between congressional Republicans and the White House involves the distribution of Title I funds, designed to help districts serve low-income students. The Fresno Unified School District relies heavily on the funds and currently receives about $46 million annually through Title I.

The stalled House bill revises the funding through an idea called “portability,” which would attach dollars to individual students rather than to the district as a whole. If the student moved, the old district would lose the money.

Republican supporters say portability promotes parental choice and ensures all low-income students receive their fair share of federal dollars. Skeptics don’t buy it; by Obama administration estimates, the Fresno district would lose upward of $4.9 million.

“A raid on those Title I dollars,” Hanson said, “would be a significant problem.”

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama meets with the Council of the Great City Schools Leadership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House March 16, 2015 in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss efforts to strengthen educational opportunities for students in city schools. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Tough Slog Ahead In Congress For No Child Rewrite

Tough Slog Ahead In Congress For No Child Rewrite

By Kyung M. Song, The Seattle Times (TNS)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Lamar Alexander earlier this month announced a symbolic breakthrough in the decadelong ideological wrangling over how to rewrite the nation’s chief education law.

Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate committee working to renew the law known as No Child Left Behind, agreed to scrap his own proposed bill in favor of a new version he would craft with Murray, the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Yet the promise of a bipartisan first draft — and quickening momentum that Congress may pass a reauthorization that is seven years overdue — has only heightened the political fissures.
Leaders of three national civil rights organizations on Feb. 10 said they will oppose any reauthorization that they say would shortchange students who are nonwhite, poor, English learners or otherwise disadvantaged.

The next day, a House committee passed a No Child bill modeled on a version the Republican-controlled House passed in 2013 without a single Democratic vote. The White House opposes the House bill, in part because it could divert federal Title 1 money earmarked for poor students to wealthier districts.

Meanwhile, opponents of annual standardized testing, led by teachers unions and some parents, are lobbying to roll back what they call “overuse and misuse” of test scores as a proxy for education quality. Instead, the National Education Association, for one, is asking the federal government to adopt a new “accountability system” that tracks access to counselors, advanced courses, qualified teachers and other elements that can influence a student’s success in school.

But business and civil rights groups and school superintendents are stepping up their support of the testing regime. Last month, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and four other organizations wrote Alexander and Murray calling annual assessments an “absolute necessity.” They urged Congress to keep the current schedule of math and reading tests each year from third to eighth grades and once in high school.

Much of the political swirl is centered on Alexander and Murray. The son of two educators, Alexander served as secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush. Since taking the helm of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in January, Alexander has zeroed in on reauthorizing No Child, officially called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Murray once taught preschool in Bothell, Wash., before running for Congress. She has made boosting education spending, especially for prekindergarten children, a legislative hallmark.

Though Murray’s party lost majority control of the Senate in the November elections, Alexander needs to sway at least six Democrats behind his No Child legislation in order to gain 60 votes needed to ward off a filibuster.

Any accord between Alexander and Murray, however, would have to reconcile their clashing views on the federal government’s role in education.

Murray believes the federal government — which put up $61 billion, or 10 percent, of the cost of educating public elementary and secondary students in fiscal 2012 — has the right to demand accountability from local schools. The federal government, she said recently, “has an important and unique role to play” to ensure quality education, particularly for lower-achieving students.

Murray opposes scaling back the number of mandatory federal tests. They total 17 tests, including one science assessment in elementary, middle and high school, spread out over ten years. Those are on top of exams imposed by states or school districts, including those required for graduation.

The House version of No Child Left Behind also would keep the current testing schedule, with support from Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

Many teachers, however, are skeptical that the testing regiment has had much to do with the slow but steady rise in scores on standardized math and reading tests over the past decade.
Stephen Miller, vice president of the Washington Education Association, believes overuse of tests has subverted the very reasons President Lyndon Johnson signed an education law in 1965: to equalize access to good public education for all American children.

Miller contends the focus and preparations for tests on core subjects like math and science have crowded out physical education, music and other programs that most help lagging students stay engaged in school.

“We’ve been testing too much and not teaching enough,” said Miller, a former Bellevue School District social-studies teacher in Washington state.

Before Alexander agreed to let Murray co-author the No Child bill, he floated the option of leaving decisions on testing up to the states. That alarmed testing advocates, who say tracking progress for specific groups of students is possible only with annual testing.

“The Alexander draft would actually allow districts to have their own set of tests, so a student who was proficient in Spokane might not be proficient in Seattle, or vice versa,” said Chad Aldeman, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit education consulting firm.

Another flashpoint is the Obama administration’s push to link test scores to teacher evaluations.

Randy Dorn, Washington state’s superintendent of public instruction, said the controversy over teacher evaluations has been “blown out of proportion.” Dorn said discerning principals can identify good teachers after 15 minutes of observations. He said that should be the main basis of grading any teacher.

Nonetheless, Dorn said, test scores also reveal something about teachers’ contributions, and they “should be an indicator” used in overall evaluations.

Murray has echoed similar views. Speaking at a HELP committee hearing in January, she said gauging teachers’ quality should be based on different measurements. But Murray said she was wary of using those measurements as “the sole factor in setting salaries or using testing as the sole indicator in an evaluation.”

Photo: Senate Democrats via Flickr

Obama Shows Spunk Pushing Brave Education Plan

Aug.12 (Bloomberg) — Although President Barack Obama is on the ropes, with even some Democratic allies describing him as weak and passive, this week he showed boldness and imagination in one vital area: education.

Obama backed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement that he will grant waivers to states that want to be excused from the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind , Washington’s much-maligned 2002 overhaul of elementary and secondary education policy.

Republican lawmakers complain that the White House waivers run roughshod over the legislative branch — and they’re right. But gridlock demands more robust use of presidential authority and, at least in this case, we’re getting it. Unless Duncan’s action is challenged and reversed on constitutional grounds, No Child Left Behind will be left behind for good.

Under Obama, education was supposed to be fertile ground for bipartisan compromise. That’s because Obama has executed a “Nixon to China” maneuver; only a Democratic president can successfully take on the teachers unions, and the president has done so in a shrewd way that avoids teacher bashing and keeps the lines of communication with the unions (big backers of Democrats) open.

Republican lawmakers broadly endorse Obama’s policies, but they’re philosophically committed to less federal involvement in education and politically committed to opposing the president whenever possible. So they’ve dragged their feet on reauthorizing NCLB, as have Senate Democrats who can’t agree on how to move a bill.

Duncan’s waivers, which are good for four years, actually enhance local control while ensuring greater accountability. But it’s a different kind of local control and a different vision of accountability than we’ve seen before.

Obama and Duncan are selling something ambitious –a new relationship between Washington and the states. The idea is to set high education standards, then let states figure out how to meet them. “We want to give them a lot more flexibility, get out of their way and let them hit that higher bar,” Duncan said last week.

Some Republican governors, such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana, joined Democratic governors in praising the plan. They and just about everyone else connected to American education are frustrated that so many schools are deemed “failing” under NCLB, even when they aren’t.

There’s a racial subtext to all this. The most common reason schools receive a failing grade is that minority students don’t perform well, dragging down a school’s scores. Duncan’s waivers will require continued focus on the achievement gap between whites and minorities, yet introduce more sophisticated accountability standards that set realistic goals for improvement.

While it deserves credit for bringing accountability into American education, NCLB inadvertently provided incentives to states to dumb down standards so that fewer schools would fail. Tennessee, for instance, was “lying to children, lying to parents,” as Duncan put it, in 2008 when state tests showed 91 percent of its children proficient in math. When Tennessee, under pressure from Washington, replaced those tests with legitimate ones the following year, only 34 percent of students proved proficient.

To underscore the urgent need for action, Duncan warned this spring that with NCLB’s standards, 80 percent of the nation’s 100,000 schools could soon be deemed failures under the law’s crude pass-fail system, which goes by the most dreaded acronym in American education: AYP — Adequate Yearly Progress.

A more accurate assessment of schools suggests that about 40 percent are headed for a failing grade, but the point remains: NCLB isn’t working. It penalizes schools for circumstances beyond their control — like the poor preparation of incoming students — and sets standards that tens of thousands of schools cannot meet. Expecting all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, as the law dictates, is a fantasy.

Duncan and Obama rightly believe that there is middle ground between what President George W. Bush memorably called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and pie-in-the-sky demands for proficiency. They favor replacing AYP with more sensible evaluations of classroom teachers, who will be judged partly on whether their students have shown improvement — even from a low baseline — over the course of a school year.

Instead of being based entirely on student tests, new teacher evaluations will also require classroom observation, student ratings and other means of assessment. Colorado, Indiana and Florida are leading the pack in developing the sophisticated accountability standards necessary for better performance.

We won’t know until September exactly what Duncan will demand of states in exchange for granting them waivers, but the price is likely to resemble the requirements imposed by Race to the Top, the competition launched by the Department of Education in 2009 that has inspired a flowering of reform across the country.

This time, states won’t compete with each other for federal money. But they will probably have to meet many of the same accountability standards demanded by Race to the Top, including closing genuinely failed schools, incorporating student performance in teacher evaluations, and applying new “common core” academic standards that are more rigorous than those adopted in the past.

Steven Brill’s forthcoming book, “Class Warfare,” offers a compelling account of Race to the Top, which, for all of its success, has also been marred by the failure of some states to meet their commitments to more rigorous teacher evaluation.

For years, teachers unions have wanted their members to be considered professionals without being held accountable for performance like other professionals. The Obama policy goes a long way toward changing that. Not surprisingly, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, told me this week that she opposes Duncan’s waivers because they shift too much accountability to teachers.

Duncan will need to use the power of the executive branch to enforce both the requirements of Race to the Top and whatever broad reforms he demands in exchange for state waivers. If that requires withholding federal funds from recalcitrant states — good. If it means overriding a dilatory and dysfunctional Congress — even better.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)