Thank you SPEAK for Cherry Creek for the original post. Fix NCLB (parent and teacher): Dear Senator Alexander, I am a 26 year veteran teacher in a public elementary school classroom, and a parent who has an child who graduated from the public school system here in Colorado. Im writing to share my thoughts on NCLB and standardized testing. As I look ahead to the second half of my school year, I must budget at least 20 instructional hours to administering the federal and state mandated PARCC and Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests. That is 20 hours of time with students when I am nothing but an overpaid test proctor, not a teacher, and that doesnt even count the time spent in preparing students for taking the test. I will not receive the results of these tests until months after I have moved on to a different group of students. Therefore, these tests have absolutely no instructional value other than to look at long term trends. By the time the next teacher receives the data, it is outdated, and of little use to them either. Since both the PARCC and CMAS are computerized this school year, I will lose access to my classroom technology for weeks at a time while other grade level students complete their required testing. I have come to rely on this technology in order to be most effective in my teaching. It is simply not good for kids to allow this technology to be unavailable to them for these long stretches of time. I value formative assessments that test the skills Im teaching and give me real time feedback for how to proceed with my instruction. If tests like PARCC and CMAS have a place at all it is as a grade-span testing tool. Yes, I do value the long term picture of how students are improving over the long term, and of course I dont want students to slip through the cracks, but students do not need to be tested each and every year to achieve these goals. It is unfair to evaluate teacher proficiency using these federally mandated assessments as well. Even the best standardized test only provides a snapshot of a particular students progress, and there are a myriad of other factors at play, such as poverty or poor attendance that too often are not given due consideration when evaluating teachers. Education needs to return to more of a localized model where individual school districts and schools have a greater say in how their students and teachers are assessed as well as how and what they are taught. Thank you so much for considering these concerns as you move forward with the committee addressing testing and accountability.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:56:34 +0000
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