WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 14: U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) (R) gestures prior to a news conference ... [+]
Before he was elected to represent New York’s 16th congressional district, Jamaal Bowman was an educator. As a principal in the Bronx, he gave strong support to New York’s opt out movement—a movement in which families and students chose to refuse to take the state’s big standardized test.
Now Bowman has proposed a big opt out for every school in the nation.
An annual high stakes test used to evaluate school districts gained considerable steam under the Bush administration and No Child Left Behind. The Obama administration upped the testing ante with Race to the Top and an attempt to develop national testing that would be used not just to evaluate districts, but individual schools and teachers.
The notion that educational effectiveness could be measured by a single standardized test of math and reading was always suspect. But the big standardized test didn’t merely fail at its stated purpose in areas like teacher evaluation and improvement; it has been actively corrosive to education in the country, narrowing the curriculum (”Is it on the test,” became the go to question of districts across the country) and taking up countless hours for test preparation.
Bowman has proposed the More Teaching Less Testing Act. Using the flexibility available under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Bowman’s proposal seeks to improve assessment and accountability, increase student learning time, and help with the nationwide difficulty in filing teaching positions (very few young people think, “I want to become a teacher so I can teach students to pass a big standardized test”). High stakes testing at its worst turns schools upside down, pushing them to focus not on the education that students need from schools and but to instead focus on the scores that the school needs the students to produce.
The act would eliminate the current federally mandated testing schedule and prohibit states from using the federally mandated testing as the “sole or dominant factor for large-scale retention policies, high school graduation decisions, teacher evaluations, or school rating systems.”
Introducing the act, Bowman said, “Our public schools have become test based factories where the curriculum has become a test preparation curriculum.”
He continued, “Learning is infinite. And the process of learning should open the infinite doors that are available in life to our children and their families. And instead, over the last 23 tears, we have had a myopic, very narrow view of how to measure so-called learning in our schools.”
Bowman noted in talking with the Washington Post that the experience of testing is different for students in elite schools than in public schools that serve poorer communities, where students typically gain lower test scores and therefor suffer from more pressure to get those test scores up— pressure that eats into time that could be spent on other educational experiences.
“Annual testing doesn’t happen in our most celebrated private schools,” he said, “and I think we need to ask ourselves why that is. Kids in those elite private schools are exposed to a robust comprehensive curriculum. There is no annual testing there. Why are we doing it to our poorest, most vulnerable children? No one has given me a good answer to that question.”
There is broad support for Bowman’s bill, though its success in the House is difficult to predict. But Bowman sees the bill as necessary and important.
It is on us as lawmakers to do right by kids, not by testing companies and large corporations.
