High-Stakes Testing

Haviland Middle School Auditorium
March 18, 2003 – 7:00

Peter Sacks, author of Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, will be our speaker

Dutchess County School Boards Association Programming - 2003-2004

Thus far, programming for 2003-2004 has been designed to support this year’s legislative priorities: to reform New York State’s education funding system and to improve state testing.

Education Funding Reform

Our September general membership meeting was an informational session featuring speakers from the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE). The meeting in the BOCES techology building was well attended by board members, a NYSUT representative, parents, and Red Hook District Business Officer Bruce Martin. Northern Dutchess Public Access TV taped and broadcast the meeting. DCSBA Executive Committee members subsequently endorsed AQE’s initiatives. The work of the coalition, consisting of more than 230 organizations across New York State, continues. On the 27th of January, AQE’s Bob Cohen with board members from Wappingers, Beacon, Red Hook CSDs, a parent and Red Hook’s business officer went to Albany to meet with Senator Saland and Assemblymen Manning and Cahill. The DCSBA Program Director would like to think that this lobbying trip contributed to the strong turn out of legislators for our legislative breakfast a few days later.

High-Stakes Testing

During discussions last spring and this fall about how school districts had weathered the Math A debacle and the Physics and English Regents controversies, DCSBA Executive Committee members expressed interest in a suggestion that we put together a general membership program to explore some of the efficacies and dangers in the ways our students are tested. Originally, we talked about organizing a panel group to discuss high stakes testing and some of its underlying issues, such as accountability versus diagnosis, the extravagant expense associated with their use and the impact they have on many of our students. Mandated testing requirements with associated flagrant, expensive NYSED testing blunders are very much related to funding questions we are putting in the foreground this year. The March 18 general membership program grew out of these discussions.

Peter Sacks, author of Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, will be our speaker. Sacks’ research and breadth of understanding about the history of uses and abuses of standardized testing are impressive. He details questionable presuppositions that have informed standardized tests from the beginning and explores implications in the fact that by definition this kind of testing is done “on the cheap” and has powerful deficiencies built into it. Paradoxically, for all the bruited cost effectiveness of standardized testing, our over investment in it is something of a bomb going off in our midst, causing massive and expensive collateral damage. Our uncritical overvaluation of standardized testing, Sacks argues, lubricates an ideologically driven accountability machine that hurts children.

Invitations to the general membership meeting at 7:00 p.m. on March 18, Haviland Middle School Auditorium, are being extended to the school-wide community: parents, teachers and administrators, as well as board members. We anticipate a lively Q & A after Mr. Sacks makes his presentation; he has sent us some questions to facilitate discussion:

1. What stands in the way of your community implementing school improvement plans that you know will make your schools better?
2. What are your schools doing right that may go unrecognized by the public and the media?
3. How can the public know what schools are doing besides relying on standardized test performance?
4. Should educators themselves be doing more to raise public awareness of the effects of high-stakes testing on teaching and learning? Is it a form of professional “malpractice” for educators to implement teaching methods required by high-stakes testing they know may be harmful to children?
5. What is the proper role of standardized tests in public education?
6. Conventional wisdom holds that if only No Child Left Behind were “fully funded” by the federal government, all would be OK. Do you agree?
7. Should your community work with state and local representatives to rework the No Child Left Behind Act? Do you feel this is even possible in the current climate?

If all of us do our homework diligently (and don’t let our dogs eat it!) our March 18 meeting will be exciting. Parents, teachers, board members and administrators interested in attending, please register with our Executive Director, Lynne Cruger, at 845.257.2820.