Georgia teachers get action on legislation that downplays testing

Praise for the bill’s passage came from many corners. State Superintendent Richard Woods, who’s been pushing to roll back testing, called the current mandates “burdensome to student learning and the recruitment and retention of our best teachers.” The legislation allows “teachers to be creative and teach rather than focus on a test,” he said.

The Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents more than half of the state’s teachers, supports the bill, as does the Georgia Association of Educators, the next largest group. The Georgia School Superintendents Association supports the bill, saying it’s good for students and teachers.

Erin Baker, a media specialist at Cobb County’s Durham Middle School, was thrilled to hear about the 45-0 vote and expected the nearly 70 teachers she works with to have a similar reaction.

“The idea that the value of a teacher is based solely on how students perform on a test is frightening,” said Baker, who traveled to the Capitol last week to testify for the bill, as her superintendent, Chris Ragsdale, watched in support. “We have teachers who are very frightened about the future of their jobs.”

Teachers say they shouldn’t be held accountable for the results of students who do not take school seriously, are transient or are distracted by instability at home.

The Senate’s proposal addresses transience and student absences by only counting the results of students present in a teacher’s classroom at least 80 percent of the school year. It reduces the weight of the test results in each teacher’s job review, which is now at least half test-based. SB 364 dials that down to 30 percent.

The bill also takes aim at the tests themselves, reducing the number of required state Milestones tests from 32 to 24 and allowing school districts to eliminate their oft-criticized “Student Learning Objectives.” The SLOs, an acronym that Tippins ridiculed on the Senate floor, were required under a federal agreement since nullified with the December rewrite of the former federal No Child Left Behind Act. SLOSs are written by each school district — often by teachers with no test-writing qualifications — for courses, such as art and music, that the Milestones don’t cover. Teachers complain they are poorly constructed, inconsistent and do little or nothing for student learning.

Tippins said it makes no sense to use a test to measure performance in such subjective areas. “Everybody wants to count beans,” he said, “but in some areas there’s no beans to count.” Although this is largely a testing rollback, he said one of the most important elements of the bill to him was the introduction of tests for the youngest students. Currently, tests are not administered until third grade, and Tippins said it’s crucial to track reading and math in first and second grades to ensure proficiency by the end of third grade, a goal of his.

The bill now goes to the House, where Education committee chairman Brooks Coleman, R-Duluth, is planning a discussion about it Wednesday. He didn't want to say anything about its prospects, but his committee has its own bill that also reduces tests to 30 percent of each teacher evaluation. House Bill 1061 likely won't make it to the Senate by Monday's deadline, but comments when it was discussed at a hearing this week were favorable, as they were when the Senate Education and Youth committee heard SB 364.

Even Students First, a group that supports rigorous testing to expose schools that need improvement, didn’t put up a fight. Its Georgia director, Michael O’Sullivan, urged lawmakers to “act cautiously.” And Rep. Randy Nix, who was the main sponsor of the 2013 legislation that made tests half of teacher evaluations, said the state had gone too far.

“We’ve tightened a little too tight,” said Nix, R-LaGrange. “We need to back off a little bit.”