State Leaders Vow To Ease Testing Burden | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dan Way, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Proposal by governor, legislators would streamline required student tests


    RALEIGH     Teachers finding their schedules packed with testing would get relief from education reforms promised by Gov. Pat McCrory and top Republican lawmakers, who say students would benefit from a streamlined list of required state and local exams.

    A $200-million proposal to hike teacher pay without increasing taxes grabbed the headlines at a Feb. 10 joint announcement by McCrory, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, House Speaker Thom Tillis, and Senate leader Phil Berger. But a plan to cull the crammed testing schedule also was unveiled.

    The multi-part reform "removes the burden of excessive testing and mandates from our classrooms so our teachers can do what they are trained to do — teach," said Forest, an ex-officio member of the State Board of Education.

    "It's an important reform, but it also is one that has to be driven by the people who actually do the work," said Elic Senter, instructional advocacy manager for the North Carolina Association of Educators, a statewide teachers lobbying organization.

    "We hear from our members with regularity that there is an overabundance of student assessment that is required by the state and federal government," Senter said.

    "Cumulatively, it ranges by school system between two and three weeks of testing, if you added it all together, and you ran it as an eight-hour school day," Senter said.

    "It's a good chunk of the school year," Senter said, with earlier grades losing the most class instructional time to mandated assessments.

    "Pre-K and elementary school are your strongest and most formative years. If the support is not there, and the time spent with the students is not there, that's where you see issues later on, and there's boatloads of research that show that on a pretty clear basis," Senter said.

    Members responding to an NCAE survey taken last fall around teaching time issues said between pre-assessments, post-assessments, and formative assessments, teachers lack the necessary time to prepare, collaborate, and teach material, "and this spring has been particularly bogged down with Read to Achieve added in," Senter said.

    Read to Achieve was a 2012 initiative of the General Assembly designed to end social promotion and ensure every child can read by third grade.

    "The question is not, 'Do public school students spend too much time taking tests?' Rather, we should be asking, 'Do tests administered by public schools accurately measure the performance of students and teachers?'" said Terry Stoops, director of research and education studies at the John Locke Foundation.

    "If Republican leaders are serious about reforming the state's accountability system, they should require the N.C. State Board of Education to adopt an independent, field-tested, and credible national test of student performance," Stoops said.

    "Poor quality, state-developed tests are the major reason why teachers object to including them in their performance evaluation," Stoops said. "Given the state's record of developing and administering shoddy tests, teachers have a valid point."

    "We have No Child Left Behind, we have Race to the Top, and all those mandates including testing, plus the General Assembly has tests that they want us to implement for other purposes," said State Board of Education President Bill Cobey.

    "So we have to look at the whole body of testing and see where can we pare down," Cobey said.

    One example of streamlining has been with the end-of-course "common exams" that have been administered at the same time teachers were giving final exams. "We've made a step that these common exams will be the final exam, and will count at least 20 percent of the student's final grade, so we've done some combining. But I don't know the perfect answer, and I don't think anybody does," Cobey said.

    A long-standing complaint about requiring large numbers of tests, and then basing teacher evaluations on how well students perform on those tests, is that teachers are put in a position to teach to the test to the exclusion of other important classroom work and material.

    "It depends on what tests you're suggesting," Cobey said, acknowledging that Read to Achieve might fit that category.

    "Certainly, [an] unintended consequence of Read to Achieve [was] way more testing, and individual testing as it related to implementation of [student reading] portfolios. But it should have been clear to everybody that it was the teachers' decision as to whether to use the portfolio" or other measurements, Cobey said.

    Most local school systems were implementing the portfolios for every student, not just those at risk of failing the reading mandate, Cobey said. That required completion of multiple standards and many tests that had to be administered one-on-one with the teacher and the student.

    Tillis said ongoing discussions with educators show dissatisfaction with the volume of rules coming from Raleigh, and lawmakers are looking for ways to increase teacher satisfaction that don't require money.

    "I think you will see some work on that in the short session," Tillis said. It begins May 14.

    Some reforms could be as simple as amending budget provisions to allow more flexibility in spending categories.

    Others could be reviewing the number of tests, "dozens approaching 100," required by local districts, the state, and federal governments, Tillis said.

    "Do these make sense?" he said. "Lighten the burden on the teachers who are really overwhelmed with the number of tests they have to administer to be compliant with one program or another."

    Some tests are tied to grants, making it more difficult to eliminate them, he said.

    However, Tillis said, "There's a clear opportunity to take some off the table if they don't think it's adding value, and it's taking the teacher away from classroom time, and what he or she thinks is in the best interests of the students."

    "There's a balance that has to be struck as far as testing is concerned," Berger said.

    "If you don't measure you really don't know where kids are," Berger said. "The problem we have is it seems the effort to measure always seems to be overdone. What we want to do is find ways to ameliorate those types of situations."

    He said the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process holds great promise.

    It provides feedback and measurements on student progress and performance during the course of an academic year.

    "What we're seeing in many respects is growth, when you can measure it, goes back to the quality of the teacher who is involved," Berger said.

    "So we're looking at that program and other similar programs to help us in making decisions, and to help local school boards to make decisions" regarding possible pay supplements for high-achieving teachers, teachers who teach in hard-to-staff schools, or in hard-to-recruit curricula such as science and math, Berger said.
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