They're still going ahead with those idiotic standardized tests

I blogged before about this. This is kind of an update.

So who believes we need the tests?

One of the congressional Democrats who signed Bowman’s letter to Cardona, Rep. Mark Takano of California, previously gave me an interesting explanation for that...

When I asked Takano about what he called the federal government’s “test and punish” approach to education policy, he stated that the testing mandate, which began when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 but still dominates today, wasn’t “designed for the types of realities in [his] school.”

What do colleagues in Congress say when he tells them this? He told me the problem in Congress is that there are two types of people who tend to dominate Beltway ideology and the philosophy that drives problem-solving.

Most people, he explained, are either from the worlds of business and finance or they’re attorneys. The former, due to their work experiences, tend to be driven by numbers and production outputs, while the latter, due to their advocacy interests, want to remedy societal problems, including those that are obvious in the education system, by “putting into place a law with all these hammers” to make someone accountable for any statistical evidence of injustice and inequality.

Neither “mentality [is] going to work in education,” he told me, because at the heart of the education process is teachers being able to build trusting relationships with students and strategizing with other teachers on how to engage students. Having to hit a mark on the annual test or worry about an accountability measure closing your school or ending your employment just gets in the way. - Jeff Bryant/LA Progressive

Standardized testing, this year, would be even more counterproductive than usual

It would be downright idiotic, really. What it would do is give ammo to public school bashers, who are already taking advantage of the effects of the pandemic with despicable, shameless fervor.

Bernie Burnham, the vice president of Education Minnesota, which is the state’s influential teachers union, said in a written statement that the “biggest concern right now for educators is students’ socioemotional and physical health.”

The union — which represents more than 70,000 teachers — is working on a set of recommendations for supporting students when they return to school buildings, Burnham said, including improving technology and internet access; providing mental health services; planning for potential future closures; and cancelling standardized tests in the spring.

“At best, the deeply flawed MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) tests give a snapshot of how groups of students are progressing compared to how groups of students were doing historically. Everyone knows this isn’t a normal year. The time and money wasted on testing could be better spent educating our students,” Burnham said in the statement. - Minnesota Reformer