It’s a non-binding resolution, but it represents the unmistakable voice of the people in one Maryland county and, I would suspect, given the overwhelming nature of the majority, the entire state.
On Jan 6, the PTA Council of Howard County approved a resolution asking the Maryland State Board of Education and the state superintendent of schools to apply for a waiver for the annual standardized tests in math and reading known as the Maryland School Assessment, the Baltimore Sun reports.
The tests have been given since 2003 or 2004, depending on the grade level, every March to every public school student in third through eighth grades. Because of new tests being developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career multi-state testing consortium, 2014 will be the last year for the MSA reading and math tests anyway, assuming a waiver is not received.
“The MSA isn’t on track with the curriculum,” the paper quoted PTA Council President Christina Delmont-Small as saying. “We are now fully entrenched in the Common Core.”
The tests from PARCC, which will be field tested in every Maryland public school this spring and go operational in the 2014-15 school year, purport to align with the learning standards in the Common Core State Standards.
The council has representatives from more than 60 of the county’s PTAs, and only two delegates voted against the resolution Monday.
A similar resolution was passed last year in Montgomery County, and Washington County in the western part of the state is said to be working something up along the lines of dropping the MSA this year as well. In addition, superintendents and teachers’ union officials have asked the state not to give the test despite the federal law that requires it, because data from the test will not be useful, as we reported.
A few years from now, we will look back at this transition in the history of our schools and laugh. We will marvel at how difficult it had become to make a common-sense decision about a law that has outlived whatever usefulness it may have once had. We will tell our grandkids not about how we walked uphill to school four miles without shoes, both ways, but how we were taken out of class for every day of a week to write in a test booklet and our scores weren’t used for any good purpose. We will laugh, that is, unless it gets worse: The “uphill both ways” story only works, after all, if the grandkids are taking buses to school.
