Jolyn Safron. (Photo: Alen Fetahi)
“In New York State, we have third graders spend nine hours on testing, which is way less than 2 percent of their school time, and it is still too much,” she said. “And it does not deal with the problems that the 220,000 parents who refused the state tests last year are saying are the problems. It isn’t just the time spent on the tests. There are so many other issues. And this just ignores all of them.”
Safron said there was still room for hope, noting that a recent presentation by Jamaal Bowman, principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, really hit the mark on Common Core and standardized testing. Addressing the governor’s Common Core Task Force at the College of New Rochelle on Oct. 29, Bowman said he was concerned about sending his 18-month old daughter to public school.
“I’m a product of a public school, but right now I don’t feel confident in placing Maya into a public school when she turns five because of the test and punish culture that we’ve created,” Bowman said. “There’s a culture of fear that is permeating throughout public school, and it is stagnating curriculum and stagnating instruction.”
Padalino said there were issues with standardized testing, but still supported their use in the school district.
“Someone asked me the other day if we have a testing problem,” he said. “Yeah, we do have a testing problem. We have some misunderstanding about what the assessments are, what they mean for our students, and we have some controversial legislation about how we use those tests to measure the success of our teachers. We use those state assessments to measure students’ progress. There is no penalty to students who don’t do well. We don’t use them as one of the criteria for moving from one grade to the next. We don’t use them to exclude students from any activities or opportunities. Here they’re used for basically two purposes: To measure a student’s progress and see if they need any extra help. I tell parents all the time that the consequence for not doing well on a New York State assessment in the Kingston City School District is you get extra help. That’s the result. If you don’t reach proficiency in the standards, we then give you extra help.”
Safron said that while she is critical of standardized tests and Common Core, that’s more to do with the system as a whole rather than the Kingston City School District itself.
“Our Kingston school system, there are a lot of good things going on,” she said. “We have good teachers who are doing good things, and our administration is doing good things. And they’re working to protect the kids in the ways that they can.”
Padalino said that the district does what it can to provide a full educational experience for its students.
“We’re doing a lot to make sure our students are not sitting in tombstone rows in the classroom with the teachers standing on front of them talking at them,” he said.
Obama’s accomplishments are going to consist of two in history:The Affordable Care Act(which does nothing to lower the costs of the most expensive and inefficient and among the lowest rated quality of care healthcare systems in industrialized societies on planet Earth), and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Under Obama, the rich got much richer while the have-nots got much poorer, although we don’t speak of the “poor” anymore(instead Obama got rid of “the poor” and replaced this concept with “income inequality”). Of late he doesn’t even seem to believe in himself.
Perhaps HE should have spent more time filling in the right bubble(??!!)
[…] Obama, Cuomo diss standardized testing, but what does it mean for Kingston? Kingston Times November 7, 2015 – I had the opportunity to respond as part of this local article. In summary I am suspicious of the intent behind the 2% testing cap (I feel it is purely for political gain) and feel that it won’t benefit students nor is it addressing the real problems with testing. […]