Parental discontent with high-stakes standardized tests rises

A pad used during the forum. (Photo by Alen Fetahi)

“We’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Padalino said. “We’re not testing much more than we have in the past. This started back in the early 1900s with the Regents exams. There’s always been testing. The fact that it’s now tied, not only to our school accountability, but to our principals’ accountability and our teachers’ accountability, that’s really brought more awareness to the public.”

The Finnish model

But is there another way? As parents and educators question the value of standardized testing, they often look to the successes of the educational system in Finland, where there are no private schools and no universal standardized tests beyond the National Matriculation Exam, which is administered following a voluntary upper-secondary school — a level loosely comparable to high school. In Finland, teachers use independent tests and base grades on their individual assessments of the student. Likewise, it is up to the building principal to determine the success of each of the teachers in the school based on observation rather than an assessment of concrete student test results. Periodically, the Finnish Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools. There was enough curiosity from this side of the Atlantic Ocean that a book called Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg was published in the United States in November 2011.

At a meeting last week of the Ulster County School Boards Association, State Education Commissioner John King fielded questions about standardized testing. Scores are expected to drop over the next few years as a result of a focus on critical thinking and more complex questions, and more “real-world” questions in math, and while King stressed that they won’t impact school accountability statuses in the first year of the changes, the groundswell of opposition locally appears to be rising. New Paltz and RondoutValley have already adopted their own resolutions against high-stakes standardized testing. Onteora and Saugerties are also seeing an increase in opposition from parents in their districts as well.

No local resolution yet

In Kingston, the Board of Education has yet to form its own resolution on the issue, and Hoetger said she was disappointed by the response from trustees on the resolution given them by the DWPC, which was taken from the Time Out From Testing (timeoutfromtesting.org) website. Padalino said he didn’t feel as though the concerns of parents like those in the DWPC and concerns of school officials are all that different.

“I don’t think we’re far apart,” Padalino said, though he stressed that there’s still plenty of work to be done. “I think we need a lot more conversations, not only with the District Wide Parents Council, but all the district’s parents about what these tests mean and what we’re doing with them. The stakes are really higher for the teachers in the district than they are for the students, and I think the parents need to understand that the tests are supposed to help us shape instruction. They’re not supposed to be the end of the line.”

Though the DWPC forum didn’t come off as initially planned, Safron said it was a success, both because it helped focus the concerns of Kingston’s parents and because it made it clear that they weren’t alone.

“People said they left with this feeling of hopefulness,” she said. “There is potential for the community to work together and come together. That’s what it’s going to take to bring about change.”

For more information on the DWPC, visit their page on the district’s official website: https://kingstoncityschools.org/parents.cfm?subpage=646772