Protesting the Test
April 23, 2012 11:28 am
It seems that someone is finally picking up on the fact that standardized testing — the cornerstone of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education reform – is just not working.
Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet reports that “opposition is clearly growing, most prominently over “value-added” teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a student’s standardized test score.
Researchers have repeatedly warned that this evaluation method is not reliable — and doesn’t take into account all of the out-of-school reasons that could affect how a student does on a test — but the Obama administration has pushed it and states have been adopting new teacher accountability systems that are heavily weighted to test scores.
In New York, hundreds of professors at colleges and universities have banded together and signed a letter to political and education officials protesting the state’s new educator evaluation system, Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, which rests largely on test scores, and asking them to reconsider the reliance on high-stakes tests.”
Petitions, resolutions and letters of protest have also been penned by school administrators in New York, Texas and Illinois and “local groups of parents and educators in a number of states have started to seek ways to coordinate their efforts to protest standardized testing and help parents “opt” their children out of these tests.”
Image from here