Someone on Rob Astorino’s campaign staff needs a good talking to.
Astorino, a Republican running for governor of New York, posted a video yesterday on education full of misnformation. Apparently no one told his staff that March 31st is the worst day to post a video like that, particularly when the content has provided those looking for fresh April Fool’s Day material such a great opportunity and a 24-hour head start. Not that we necessarily needed one.
Astorino’s main foray into education policy, prior to yesterday’s video, was his promotion of an anti-bullying campaign featuring the Amazing Spiderman. Let’s see. A lonely guy with low self-esteem gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains extraordinary superpowers that allow him to beat up pretty much any bad guy he wants to. You can see how that provides a complete set of coping skills for children who are victims of bullying.
In all seriousness, I bring up the Spiderman thing because Astorino’s criticisms of the Common Core and the field-testing of the PARCC exam that started this week reflect about the same level of thoughtlessness. One of Astorino’s criticisms is that not enough is known about PARCC for it to be used as a student assessment. Actually, quite a bit of work has been done to help ensure that PARCC is a reliable and valid measure of student achievement. It’s safe to assume that much more research has been done on PARCC than on Astorino’s Spiderman anti-bullying campaign.
Moreover, what’s apparently lost on Astorino is that the field-testing being done this week is exactly the kind of work needed to inform further use of PARCC as a student assessment. You can’t figure out how good a student test is without field-testing students.
Astorino’s video statement yesterday was issued the day after Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators reached agreement on a bill moving New York toward smarter testing rather than more testing. Astorino apparently missed the announcement. That bill, among other things, enacts a 1% cap on both state testing time and local standardized testing time and a 2% cap on the amount of time dedicated to test prep. You can’t make testing much more de minimus than that.
I find it fascinating that much of the anti-testing fervor comes from Westchester County residents like Astorino who hail from some of New York’s most affluent school districts. Up until the 1990s, when only a fraction of students took the NY state Regents exam because of its alignment with college admissions criteria, I can’t remember anyone in Westchester County protesting “over-testing.” I can’t remember anyone objecting to the imposition of a state test on local school districts. I don’t recall anyone trying to incite a movement for parents to opt their children out of state testing.
Why – now that all students regardless of zip code have to take tests designed to make sure they are getting a high-quality education that prepares them for college and a well-paying career – is there so much opposition to testing from communities that were previously quite OK with a state exam reserved only for the elite? I don’t know. But it sure is peculiar.
The most important thing that folks like Astorino overlook is that PARCC is designed to rectify many of the problems with the student achievement tests that are being used now. The PARCC test moves away from the fill-in-the-bubble format we all abhor. It is designed to test higher-order thinking. It can be scored quickly so teachers can access the results to inform instruction, unlike current tests that provide data only after a student has already moved on to the next grade.
Astorino is not alone in sitting on the sidelines except to criticize constructive efforts aimed at making student assessments more valid as measures of college readiness and more useful to teachers as tools to improve classroom instruction. Inexplicably, a vocal anti-testing minority would rather backtrack on PARCC than have the state advance assessments that address many of the shortcomings of the tests in use now.
That is, all kidding aside, downright foolish. For the sake of the next generation of New York students, we simply can’t let it happen.
Charles Barone has more than 25 years of experience in education service, research, policy, and advocacy. Prior to joining Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) full-time in January of 2009, Barone worked for five years as an independent consultant on education policy and advocacy. His clients, in addition to DFER, included the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the Education Trust, The Education Sector, and the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.