Even as Georgia moves to a new high-stakes test, Superintendent John Barge has offered his support for a national set of guidelines aimed at making sure such tests are coherent and of high quality.
Those guidelines, issued Wednesday by a national group of state superintendents and the country's largest school districts, come as parents, teachers and education leaders question the amount and importance of high-stakes tests.
“I believe we are testing students too much and have overlapping and redundant assessments at the state and local level,” Barge said.
Standardized tests have been administered in Georgia and across the country from elementary school through high school to determine student mastery of academic material. Sometimes, those tests determine how teachers are rated.
Testing has been the primary way states have measured progress in closing the gap in academic performance between different groups of students, a major goal of the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
While some see testing as a way to make sure students are learning and educators are held accountable, a pushback against testing has been intensifying. Many parents and educators now argue that the emphasis on testing is overly stressful to students and saps the flexibility of teachers.
Underscoring just how fast the pendulum is swinging away from frequent and high-stakes standardized tests, both President Barack Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, issued statements of support for the testing guidelines.
“While the goals behind No Child Left Behind – promoting school accountability and closing the achievement gap – were admirable, in too many cases the law created conditions that failed to give our young people the fair shot at success they deserve,” Obama said. “Too many states felt they had no choice but to lower their standards and emphasize punishing failure more than rewarding success. Too many teachers felt they had no choice but to teach to the test.”
The guidelines, issued Wednesday by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools, call for standardized tests to be meaningful, coherent and of high quality. The organizations also said they will review state- and district-level tests.
At the end of this school year, Georgia will begin administering its Georgia Milestones test, a new test expected to be harder than the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test it replaces.
The material on Georgia Milestones is expected to be tougher, and meeting the state standard for content mastery will be tougher, too. The state is raising the threshold for whether or not a student has mastered enough of the test material.
In its successful pursuit of a waiver from No Child Left Behind rules, Georgia promised to tie student performance on its standardized test to teacher ratings.
This was to be the first school year the test would be used that way, but Barge — citing the newness of both Georgia Milestones and the evaluation system — has asked for federal permission to delay the consequences of tying test results to teacher ratings.
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