Hillary Clinton Abandoning Education Reform
"New York is a hotbed of anti-testing activism, especially in affluent suburban districts, where parents who equate testing with excessive curriculum pressure have joined forces with teachers unions who see standardized tests as a tool that subjects them to unwanted accountability. Hillary Clinton has already distanced herself from the education-reform movement, which is a predictable course of action for a Democrat facing a contested primary. The looming New York primary has raised the pressure for her to placate the burgeoning “opt-out” movement, which encourages students to boycott standardized tests. Bill Clinton asserted last week that even one national test per year is too many. “The idea of having to give a national test every year for five years in a row for people from the third to the eighth grade doesn’t make as much sense as investing the same amount of money in helping the teachers to be better teachers.”
There are certainly reasons to believe some schools spend too much time on tests and that consolidation is in order. But this is an odd position for a liberal politician to take, for many reasons. The resource cost to implement a single annual national test is minuscule. And the use of data to measure the effectiveness of public policy is a foundation of progressive governance going back more than a century. Opting out of tests degrades their value as a data tool and makes it harder, or even impossible, for policymakers to measure what is working and what isn’t.
What's more, testing is an important tool to measure racial and economic equality. A report this year by Ulrich Boser and Catherine Brown at the Center for American Progress found that states that use standards-based reform have produced better outcomes for low-income children. (My wife, Robin Chait, used to work as an education-policy analyst at CAP, and now works for a public charter school.) Not surprisingly, civil-rights organizations representing African-Americans and Latinos have argued to keep in place annual national testing."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/hillary-clinton-abandoning-education-reform.html
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Hills
