Lately, student testing has become everyone’s favorite political punching bag. Just this week, New York State United Teachers, the state’s powerful teachers union, issued a statement decrying the proliferation of new tests and insisting on a moratorium for their use in teacher evaluations.
The union didn’t mention its dirty little secret: It’s a big part of the problem. Yet instead of owning up to its role or trying to fix the problem, the union is scapegoating state Education Commissioner John King, Gov. Cuomo and the state Board of Regents.
It’s a little like the Cookie Monster demanding to know who emptied the jar.
Here’s what happened: In 2010, New York joined more than a dozen other states in bringing its outdated teacher evaluation systems out of the Dark Ages. For nearly a century, teachers across the state had been simply deemed either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” by their supervisors. Great teachers got no additional recognition, and almost nobody was ever deemed “unsatisfactory.” State law prohibited student learning outcomes from being considered.
Then, a coalition of New York leaders from both parties came together to pass legislation modernizing educator evaluations and embracing richer learning standards.
Despite the union’s longstanding desire to exclude any connection between student learning and teacher performance assessments, the law decreed that 40% of a teacher’s performance would rest on progress in student learning. Existing state tests would be a factor in the grades where they are given.
But seeking to preserve its considerable clout and ensure that as little weight as possible be given to statewide tests, NYSUT lobbyists sought and won a concession that half of that 40% would be negotiated locally at the bargaining table, where union leverage is often overwhelming.
Fast-forward to today. The union-driven provision has created a monster. To comply with collectively bargained contracts, districts are layering new tests upon tests. Some of them are useful; many are unnecessary.
Now that communities are noticing the trend and complaining that the new tests are taking too much time away from instruction, the union seems to have forgotten all about its role.
Worse, the unions and some districts are exploiting parent frustration in hopes of reversing important accountability measures that they never liked in the first place.
Consider some of the extreme examples of how this has played out:
-Districts have launched what they call “pretests” at the start of the school year, to measure where students start out academically. Ironically, the state Education Department never advised districts to do these additional new tests; that advice came from United Teachers itself prior to the 2012-13 school year.
-Glen Cove, L.I., is adding third-party vendor assessments to existing state tests in grades K-8. None of those assessments are required by the state.
-In Harrison, Westchester County, the same Regents exams that have been given for the past century are used to show high school students’ mastery in their subject matter. But the local union and district added yet another test that students must take in the same subject matter.
Not all tests are bad, and some districts may have valid purposes for their new assessments. If so, they should own their decisions rather than blaming the state.
But if the union is sincere about reining in truly excessive testing and building truly useful evaluation systems, the easiest fix is to tackle this problem where it first arose: at the local bargaining table. There’s nothing stopping the state teachers union from taking action to fix this issue tomorrow.
Nothing, that is, except the cynical desire to exploit this issue for every last ounce of political leverage.
Williams is executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. Daly is president of education advocacy group TNTP.
