NY State Education Dept: Testing Over Learning

The NY State Education Departments plans to administer state ELA and Math tests in a few weeks.

WHY?

Despite the most obvious argument against it , the fact that the past 12 months have been a national disaster for families experiencing all kinds of trauma and the fact that New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic has experienced more chaos and loss in learning than any time since state standardized tests began, there are other blatant reasons why replacing four days of learning with four days of test-taking show such a lack of care and understanding.

Fully remote students will be automatically excused for the test because they haven’t figured out how to include them; while blended students may opt out (as in past years), leaving a tested cohort per school that is too small to have much validity.

And what would the students who are excused from the state tests (probably close to half of students in non charter, non private NYC district schools) be doing during those four days? Maybe they’ll be in the park if the weather is nice. Or maybe they’ll be at home watching video games and playing Minecraft.

Instead of teaching and learning, teachers and a few students will get to spend 4 days with tests for the sake of bureaucratic rules from the Federal and State education departments.

Email, call or write your federal and state representatives and remind them that our children have been suffering for the past year and they deserve better. Money for education - ESPECIALLY this year- should not be contingent on test results!