I still think hell will freeze over before Congress does what many educators keep hoping they’ll do with No Child Left Behind—i.e., repeal it—but HR 4172 will take a little chunk out of the worst federal education law ever enacted if it is approved in both chambers and signed by the president.
The “Student Testing Improvement and Accountability Act” was introduced on March 6 by Rep Chris Gibson, Republican of New York, and Rep Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, and was referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
It would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to make it unnecessary to test students every year in math and reading. The amendment will create “grade spans” and allow testing of each student only once in each grade span. Typically this would be something like once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school.
But the bill is a long way from the point where we can look at the details.
The National Education Association immediately endorsed the bill.
The National Education Association and its 3 million members applaud Representatives Gibson and Sinema for listening to the growing chorus of voices from parents, teachers, students, and entire communities expressing concern about the detrimental effects and harm caused by the overuse and misuse of high-stakes standardized testing. The federal testing mandates, combined with state and district level assessments, have snowballed to create the feeling that our schools are not centers of learning, but rather are test-prep factories.
A good compromise or the prolonging of a bad law?
There are no doubt good educators who think this amendment won’t go far enough. Even if the amendment is approved, there will still be federally mandated standardized tests. For many groups of educators, the only solution is an absolute elimination of mandated testing.
Other educators, though, see this as a step in a good direction with NCLB. Many of these educators feel the absolute elimination of mandated testing is unreachable, and in the meantime, real kids are sitting in front of them, in real classrooms, in real schools, spending way too much time taking bad tests.
I’m voting with the latter group.
To say this amendment extends a bad law is disingenuous, naïve, and short-sighted. People who take this position are generally those who complain that too many reforms have been hoisted on teachers at once. They want it both ways: Piling all reforms on teachers at once is bad, but eliminating an entire law at once is good. That’s disingenuous.
Evidence of naïveté comes from students who this year are taking tests that don’t even count only because a federal law says they have to. Once every three years is better than once every year, any way you look at it. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
And when it comes to short-sightedness, I feel people in the first camp aren’t looking outward. They are or were excellent educators who don’t need results from standardized tests to know how their kids are doing. But not every teacher in every school in every state is in that same commanding position. There are bad teachers, and there are also good teachers who can’t write test questions.
Standardized tests today don’t paint a very thorough or accurate picture of student understanding, but they used to. If we had tests like Maryland’s former MSPAP tests—which used the grade span idea, had no bubble answers, assigned project-like tasks that crossed four disciplines instead of questions that could only measure one indicator from the learning standards, aggregated results by teacher and by school instead of reporting scores for every kid every year—we would find that even good teachers could learn a great deal from the results.
NCLB doomed the MSPAP tests, though. Developing items and scoring responses—all done by teachers in the state, who set up camp over the summer so they could do this—was too labor intensive under a federal law that required the state to test every kid every year. There weren’t enough days to do it for so many kids, so Maryland put the MSPAP tests in a filing cabinet and went with the current tests.
I extend my thanks to Mr Gibson and Ms Sinema for introducing HR 4172 at a time when its chances of becoming law can only be considered bleak. But it was a cold winter. It could happen.
