“In Florida, which tests students more frequently than most other states, many schools this year will dedicate on average 60 to 80 days out of the 180-day school year to standardized testing.” So it is written in an article recently released in the New York Times titled “States Listen as Parents Give Rampant Testing an F.”
Of issue, as per a serious set of parents, include the following:
- The aforementioned focus on state standardized testing, as highlighted above, is being defined as a serious educational issue/concern. In the words of the article’s author, “Parents railed at a system that they said was overrun by new tests coming from all levels — district, state and federal.”
- Related, parents took issue with the new Common Core tests and a ” state mandate that students use computers for [these, and other] standardized tests” which has “made the situation worse because computers are scarce and easily crash” and because “the state did not give districts extra money for computers or technology help.”
- Related, “Because schools do not have computers for every student, tests are staggered throughout the day, which translates to more hours spent administering tests and less time teaching. Students who are not taking tests often occupy their time watching movies. The staggered test times also mean computer labs are not available for other students.”
- In addition, parents “wept as they described teenagers who take Xanax to cope with test stress, children who refuse to go to school and teachers who retire rather than promote a culture that seems to value testing over learning.” One father cried confessing that he planned to pull his second grader from school because, in his words, “Teaching to a test is destroying our society,” as a side effect of also destroying the public education system.
Regardless, former Governor Jeb Bush — a possible presidential contender and one of the first governors to introduce high-stakes testing into “his” state of Florida — “continues to advocate test-based accountability through his education foundation. Former President George W. Bush, his brother, introduced similar measures as [former] governor of Texas and, as [former] president, embraced No Child Left Behind, the law that required states to develop tests to measure progress.”
While the testing craze existed in many ways and places prior to NCLB, NCLB and the Bush brothers’ insistent reliance on high-stakes tests to reform America’s public education system have really brought the U.S. to where it is today; that is, relying even more on more and more tests and the use of VAMs to better measure growth in between the tests administered.
Likewise, and as per the director of FairTest, “The numbers and consequences of these tests have driven public opinion over the edge, and politicians are scrambling to figure out how to deal with that.” In the state of Florida in particular, “[d]espite continued support in the Republican-dominated State Legislature for high-stakes testing,” these are just some of the signs that “Florida is headed for a showdown with opponents of an education system that many say is undermining its original mission: to improve student learning, help teachers and inform parents.”
