Congressman Proposes End To The Big Standardized Test
Over at Forbes.com, I take a look at Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s bill to end the era of the Big Standardized Test.
Before he was elected to represent New York’s 16th congressional district, Jamaal Bowman was an educator. As a principal in the Bronx, he gave strong support to New York’s opt out movement—a movement in which families and students chose to refuse to take the state’s big standardized test.
Now Bowman has proposed a big opt out for every school in the nation.
An annual high stakes test used to evaluate school districts gained considerable steam under the Bush administration and No Child Left Behind. The Obama administration upped the testing ante with Race to the Top and an attempt to develop national testing that would be used not just to evaluate districts, but individual schools and teachers.
The notion that educational effectiveness could be measured by a single standardized test of math and reading was always suspect. But the big standardized test didn’t merely fail at its stated purpose in areas like teacher evaluation and improvement; it has been actively corrosive to education in the country, narrowing the curriculum (”Is it on the test,” became the go to question of districts across the country) and taking up countless hours for test preparation.
Bowman has proposed the More Teaching Less Testing Act. Using the flexibility available under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Bowman’s proposal seeks to improve assessment and accountability, increase student learning time, and help with the nationwide difficulty in filing teaching positions (very few young people think, “I want to become a teacher so I can teach students to pass a big standardized test”). High stakes testing at its worst turns schools upside down, pushing them to focus not on the education that students need from schools and but to instead focus on the scores that the school needs the students to produce.