At the end of every school year, Stephen Lazar, a New York City social studies teacher, would stand in front of his students and apologize to them for turning into a “bad teacher” to prepare them for the Regents exams.
On Wednesday morning, he spoke of this experience to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which was addressing a major question in American education: Are annual standardized tests necessary?
While almost every committee member in the overflowing hearing room said the burden of standardized testing must be reduced, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Patty Murray (Wash.) argued they are still needed, noting that tests can hold states accountable when it comes to teaching the most disadvantaged kids.
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Marty West, a Harvard education scholar who testified at the hearing, noted that less than half of standardized testing is federally mandated. “Grade-span testing makes it harder to look at performance over time,” he said. He advocated maintaining the current testing requirements “while restoring to states virtually all decisions about the design of their accountability systems.”
Stepping too far back from testing requirements could strand poor and minority students, said Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The bill, as a general matter, bends over backward to accommodate the interests of state and local government entities that have both failed our children and avoided any real accountability for their failures,” he said. “Congress must not pass any … bill that erodes the federal government’s power to enforce civil rights in education.”
