FromEd Week, followed by my comment:
The New
York City Council has passed a resolution asking state officials to replace
high-stakes standardized tests with multiple measures that collectively gauge
student achievement.
The city
council's education committee approved Resolution 1394 on Monday, and the full
council approved it Tuesday by a vote of 49-0, according to a staff member in
Councilmember Robert Jackson's office.
The
resolution was written by a group of national organizations last year and has
been circulated since then as a model piece of legislation to revamp current
testing regimens.
Posted on
the websites of such groups as Time Out From
Testing and the National Center
for Fair and Open Testing, the resolution has been endorsed by
more than 18,000 individuals and 570 organizations, including the National
Education Association and local school boards (you can see who signed it here).
New York
City activists are hoping that the testing skepticism expressed by incoming
Mayor Bill DeBlasio gives them reason for hope that the city's current testing
program will be overhauled.
You can
see the language of the entire resolution online, with its list of
"whereas" statements that lay out the reasons for the action. But the
action paragraph reads like this:
"The
Council of the City of New York calls upon the New York State Education
Department, the New York State Legislature, and the Governor to reexamine
public school accountability systems and to develop a system based on multiple
forms of assessment which do not require extensive standardized testing."
Comments:
11:57 AM on December 11, 2013
I think the Council's actions represent the moral equivalent of
declaring that most murder should be outlawed or that we should have a limited
amount of legalized slavery. Until high stakes testing, which is both racist
and classist in its historical origins and current practice, is eradicated,
sane and humane schools remain an entirely unrealized ethical imperative.
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