I love a good debate with Senator Jim Bolin. But I can’t fight him on Senate Bill 85, his effort to provide parents and students with a clear policy allowing them to opt out of standardized tests.
Bolin has sponsored similar legislation in the past. This Session, his SB 85 proposes this addition to the statute (SDCL 13-3-55) requiring third- through eighth graders and eleventh graders to sit for standardized tests:
However, no student is required to take any assessment administered pursuant to this section if the student’s parent or guardian, or, if the student is emancipated, the student submits a request for an exemption from the assessments on forms provided by the Department of Education to the superintendent of the school district within one hundred eighty days of the start of any school fiscal year. The request for an exemption shall be dated and signed by the parent or guardian, or the emancipated student, and the request shall be notarized. No school district or school district employee may take any punitive action against a student, including preventing the student from participating in any extracurricular activity, due to the student’s exemption from the testing requirements established in this section [2017 SB 85].
That 180-day deadline is a bit tricky: under SB 85, I wouldn’t be able to get my daughter out of this year’s standardized tests, but I have roughly from January 1 to July 1 of this year to submit my request (ahem—demand!) that she not be subjected to next year’s round of answering a computer’s mostly irrelevant questions. I don’t see a problem with walking in the month of the standardized test and saying, “Nope, not my child. Just give her some math practice and time to read To Kill a Mockingbird.”
But hey, I won’t quibble much over dates if Senator Bolin can round up the votes to tell the central education establishment to jump in a lake. My critique of standardized tests as a waste of valuable education time is on the record. I am as opposed to the state Department of Education (these tests are mandated by the state, not your local school board) overriding the will of teachers and parents as I am to legislators overriding the will of the voters (dang, I shouldn’t remind Jim of that when I’m trying to make nice… but Jim! Do you see the connection?).
Support parents’s rights, student learning, and optimally productive use of school time. Support Senator Bolin’s SB 85.
Testing overuse and misuse is damaging public education by eating up classroom time, narrowing curriculum and driving many students out of school. It is perpetuating a false narrative of failure and putting schools in low-income communities at risk of closure or privatization.
http://www.fairtest.org/get-involved/opting-out
Teachers already know which individual kids are falling behind but without standardized tests would there be a way for the Dept. of Ed. to identify schools where students were falling behind? If so what is it? Or, maybe the SD Dept. of Ed. doesn’t need to know that information?
@Nick SD Dept. of Ed. would ask the teachers; anonymously if necessary. Information from administrators is invalid. They have to much at stake not to fudge the numbers. Same with school boards. Only teachers can give accurate information and it’s more relevant than a standard test.
I wouldn’t have a problem with an opt-out, but only for the second standardized test. I think every student, whether in public school, private school or home schooled, should be required to take one standardized test per year.
Then universities and employers will not know what your kid is good at.
I always enjoyed taking standardized tests in school. In retrospect, it’s good practice for the standardized tests that will really count – ACT/SAT.
A friend’s daughter was asked by her middle school to take the ACT just to see what she would get. A 22 score at age 13 is not too shabby.
Cory, I’m surprised at your lack of a nuanced approach to standardized tests. I haven’t read your critique in the link, so maybe there is more to your position than meets the eye in this article.
First of all, any time Senator Bolin is in favor of something and you are inclined to support him, you should know enough to revisit the issue from all angles. ;-)
There are many reasons to have some level of standardized test in our schools. Some of the reasons are:
1) to provide baseline information on how schools are doing (keeping in mind it is only one measure)
2) give students practice and preparation for important standardized tests that they take later in high school or college that can have profound effects on their academic options after high school.
3) to provide information on how each individual student in a given classroom does on a standardized test compared to their peers in the classroom and their peers in state or nationwide.
Even if you are not a fan of standardized tests, you should allow your children to take them because it improves the reliability of the data to the extent that more children take the tests. You can’t seriously make the argument that a couple hours of testing here and there is going to significantly take away from the time that kids otherwise have to learn. When the rest of the class is taking the tests, I can’t imagine that the non-test-taking kids are going to make huge academic strides. A lot of kids will probably waste this time.
I’m sure your critiques of having standardized tests include teaching to the test and thoughts that the teaching methods were compromised by this. I think moderation is the key in most things and here as well. There should be a mix of teaching methodology. It’s not as if we don’t have standards that drive what is taught in the classroom. How you convey that knowledge is generally left to the discretion of the teacher. New methods are experimented with and tested constantly.
The bottom line is that the data that we get from the tests is not the be all and end all, but it is valuable and one of the few empirical ways in which we can evaluate how the education system is working.
You two make a good pair. Coiffed and quaffed, indeed.
I’m not nuanced on Common Core or year-round school, either. :-)
I’ll grant the reasonability of your #1 and #3. Your #2, the idea that we need to give kids tests so they are ready for more tests begs the question. Rather than reinforcing others’ use of the testing regime, we should discourage those other entities from focusing on those tests.
“You can’t seriously make the argument that a couple hours of testing here and there is going to significantly take away from the time that kids otherwise have to learn.” You’ve obviously never seen the look in my eye when a pep rally shortens my class, or when an announcement interrupts my class’s approach to an epiphany about the rules of exponents. I am extremely jealous of my classroom time. The standardized tests take ten hours or so over a two-week period. I can squeeze more learning (one more chapter, one more verb conjugation pattern, one more set of student performances, one more metaphor) out of every one of those hours.
Part of my inclination against standardized tests is my bias toward my own teaching abilities. I don’t need someone else’s test to tell me what my students have learned. I make everyone of my tests and I love doing it. My tests tell me what the kids learned about what we covered, in all of my own curriculum’s quirky glory. Our chapters in the French book, our novels that we read, our math formulas and trig identities that we focused on—my tests tell me what I need to know. If I do them right, they tell students, parents, and administrators what they need to to know.
The best tests, like the best tomatoes, are home-grown.
Funny thing is, like Ror, I love taking tests.
I also love giving tests. I love the smell of mortal terror in the morning, not to mention the blissful sound of thirty teenagers thinking harder than they have all week.
Cory, your response on this issue is colored with the emotion of a person who is too close to the issue. You have admitted that you are jealous of any class time that is not yours and your bias in favor of your own teaching abilities. I do applaud your enthusiasm for teaching and the excitement for learning that you exude.
However, you seem to have abandoned reason and logic in favor of emotion and, shall I say, the ecstasy of being a part of the learning process. Focusing on one more metaphor or conjugated verb pattern or one more chapter in a book is focusing on the trees and missing the view of the forest. If we don’t have some data on how our students are doing as a whole and among their peers, we don’t know how we are doing in the education field. We don’t know what areas of curriculum or teaching methods or resources may be lacking. We would have no way to compare different schools against each other and different states against each other.
If there are no standardized tests and thus no national or statewide way to objectively measure part of the learning process, we end up with uninformed debates where one person’s opinion and anecdotal evidence is equally valid as another. Think of the way that the NRA pushed legislation to prohibit government measurement and analysis of gun related incidents. To a large extent, they have succeeded in muddying the waters on gun policy debates because of the lack of data. Imagine Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos similarly unencumbered by the data that says test scores have not increased appreciably in charter schools!
Instead of the reasoned approach of taking a small portion of the school year and devoting the time and resources to gather objective data on one aspect of student achievement, you want us to rest on the subjective assessments of millions of different teachers. If you weren’t so close to the issue, I think you would have to conclude that some well constructed standardized testing is valuable and informative. To the extent that you are helping fossils like Jim Bolin and Betsy DeVos tear at the fabric of education, you do a disservice to the education of our children.
Emotionally too close to the issue? Well, I guess that excludes every teacher and parent from education policymaking….
Any hour spent learning something new is more valuable than an hour spent taking standardized tests. We can get the data we need from qualified teachers in each classroom authentically assessing their students’ learning and abilities on a regular basis. We have plenty of other metrics to diagnose the education system: pass/fail rates, graduation rates, matriculation rates, remedial course rates….
The difference between the NRA and the NEA would be that the NRA consists of marketers and propagandists who try to shut down science while the NEA consists of hundreds of thousands of professional committed to doing science (i.e., quality teaching, practice, and assessments) every day in their classrooms.
One nationwide standardized test presents only a sliver of the picture that can be provided by the sum of observations of hundreds of thousands of different teachers. It’s like the difference between central planning and the free market. No practical test that we can compose and administer to every child in the country will capture the information we get from the teachers in the classroom. All those diverse parts really do add up to a better whole.
But I wonder: just how objective are the standardized tests when teachers get to prep their kids for them and then administer those tests in their own classrooms? If you’re really after independent, objective assessment, shouldn’t you require that the tests take place in a setting like ACT or SAT, outside the school day, outside of any control of the teachers whose work we are testing, and without any prep books or classes available to skew the results?
It’s a small slice but I have four high school teachers in my immediate family. We don’t talk politics at Thanksgiving. One thing all four do agree on is the need to remove the standardized test prep time and examination time from their classrooms.
I don’t like standardized tests either, even though I was pretty good at them. Having said that, isn’t this issue similar to regulation? People who are good at what they do find regulations hindering. But we have them anyway because not everyone is good at what they do. Just a little bit of accountability.
Testing has gotten out of hand in some places. One test a year is enough and let’s make sure it’s done as honestly as possible.
“If there are no standardized tests and thus no national or statewide way to objectively measure part of the learning process, we end up with uninformed debates where one person’s opinion and anecdotal evidence is equally valid as another. ” Read that again.
I find it rather disturbing that there is opposition to taking time for tests, but no opposition to shutting down classes so students can take off for sports events.
Well there’s at least opposition from Cory. He doesn’t even like a good pep rally ;-).
I have all the pep I need. Now, next verb chart!