Kids take too many tests, Obama administration concedes


  • October 25, 2015
  • /   Ron Stallcup
  • /   education

Anya Kamenetz, NPR's lead education blogger has a story about Saturday's announcement that President Obama wants students to stop taking unnecessary tests. You can read Anya's full story here.

Obama and the Department of Education released a Testing Action Plan, calling on states to cut back on "unnecessary testing" that consumes "too much instructional time" and creates "undue stress for educators and students.”

From the administration's Testing Action Plan:

TWO PERCENT CAP: The administration recommends capping at 2 percent the amount of classroom time students spend taking required, statewide standardized tests. It also suggests schools be required to send parents written notice if students exceed this cap and to post an action plan "to describe the steps the state will take to review and eliminate unnecessary assessments."

FLEXIBILITY ON TEACHER EVALUATIONS: Federal rules requiring the use of test scores in teacher evaluations have angered teacher unions.  The administration pledges more flexibility to states in designing teacher evaluation systems that include other measures of student progress, especially in the case of, for example, an art teacher being evaluated using student English scores.

MULTIPLE MEASURES: The administration also promises technical support and, in some cases, money to states that want to expand the use of portfolios, projects, technology-supported assessments, competency-based assessments, student surveys, measures of school climate and discipline and other indicators besides standardized tests to determine how well students are learning and schools are functioning. The plan also calls on Congress to fund states that want to "audit" their testing and cut back on redundant or low-quality tests.

Also on Saturday, Oct. 24:

A just-released survey by the Council of Great City Schools found that also contributing to the "burden of testing" is a laundry list of formative, benchmark, diagnostic, and practice tests required at the state and district level. According to the survey, the average student will take 112 standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation, spending as much as 25 hours a year testing.

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