WASHINGTON – Teachers’ union leaders in upstate New York say they hope the U.S. Senate’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization will send a message to the state legislature about measuring standardized testing.
The Senate bill, renamed the Every Child Achieves Act, would give individual states the option to choose how test scores figure into holding teachers accountable. The legislation, sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., is being debated on Capitol Hill.
Stacey Caruso-Sharpe, a math teacher and vice president of the American Federation of Teachers in Amsterdam, New York, said she appreciates that the bill shifts the focus from test scores to more freedom in choosing ways of measuring student success.
“These are people, these are kids, they’re not widgets,” Caruso-Sharpe said in an interview at the AFT convention in Washington Monday. “There’s a lot more to life than just what’s going to be on the test.”
Although the bill is moving in the right direction at the national level, state legislators can still decide to what degree test scores matter in their respective states, she said. And in New York, test scores matter a lot.
“On the state level we’re still being held to that,” Caruso-Sharpe said. “It’s still a problem.”
The 2002 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a law expanding the federal role in public education, was supposed to be updated in 2007. The House passed a version of the bill earlier this month, but without any Democrats supporting the legislation.
Under existing law, students are expected to meet certain academic goals based on standardized tests. Funding for schools can be withheld if students don’t reach required achievement levels. New York, along with 40 other states, have applied for exemptions from the federal law’s requirements.
More than 2,000 AFT union members, are in Washington this week for an annual conference. The union president, Randi Weingarten, drew attention to the bipartisan Senate bill during her keynote address Monday.
“We need the current Senate bill to pass,” Weingarten said. “We need this reset and we’re going to keep the pressure on until we get the overhaul of No Child Left Behind.”
The political landscape surrounding standardized testing has changed in recent years, Weingarten said at a news conference. Before, teachers would often hit a brick wall when they talked about changing things.
“There were just no-win conversations,” she said. “It was really rigged against local decision making, against what teachers and parents had to say…the change is because that didn’t work.”
Carl Korn, press officer for the New York State United Teachers – an AFT affiliate – said in a phone interview from Latham, New York, that many New York teachers think the bill is a step in the right direction. It’s time to return teacher evaluation decisions to local communities, Korn said.
The national trend is moving away from standardized testing due to research by the American Statistical Association, Korn said. The research showed that popular “value-added” methods, using complex equations to measure a teacher’s success based on students’ test scores, don’t hold water. Even so, he said, New York state leaders have put more emphasis on student test scores.
“Perhaps this will be a light bulb that goes off that signals to the legislature it’s time to move away from failed policy,” Korn said.
The AFT conference in Washington runs through Wednesday.
Weingarten is optimistic the law will get its overdue update. “If the Senate can do something in a bipartisan way, the House should be able to do the same thing in a bipartisan way.”
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