President Obama met with educators Monday to discuss his new proposal to reduce class time devoted to standardized tests, but the White House wouldn’t say whether it will insist Congress includes the administration’s startling policy reversal in a rewrite of federal education law.
Mr. Obama wants the federal government to be more of a partner with local school districts in figuring out how to measure students’ learning “in a smarter way,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said after the meeting.
“The president acknowledged there is more that the federal government can do to make sure there isn’t too much emphasis on testing,” he said.
Mr. Obama convened the meeting behind closed doors at the White House with outgoing Education Secretary Arne Duncan and school officials in the wake of a growing outcry by students, parents and teachers about the amount of time children spend on standardized tests, especially since the introduction of Common Core standards in 2010. Deputy Education Secretary John King, who has been nominated to replace Mr. Duncan in December, also attended the session.
Mandatory testing as an effort to make teachers accountable and to help students improve was central to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” education initiative as well as the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top.” Teachers’ unions, a key part of the Democrats’ base, are strongly opposed to the initiative.
Support or opposition to Common Core has essentially become a conservative litmus test for Republicans in the 2016 presidential race. Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton embraced the principles laid out by Mr. Obama on Saturday.
“We should be ruthless in looking at tests and eliminating them if they do not actually help us move our kids forward,” she said in a statement.
The vast majority of states agreed to the Common Core standards when they were released in 2010 with the backing of the National Governors Association. However, there has since been a growing criticism among Republicans and Democrats that the federal government is now too involved in what should be state- and local-level educational decisions.
While conceding the turnabout, Mr. Earnest said the president “has always made the case that standardized testing is not the only way to evaluate student progress, and that an overly time-consuming focus on standardized testing is not the best way to ensure that our students are getting a good education.”
“I would acknowledge the president believes there’s more we can and should do,” he said.
Prior to the meeting, Mr. Duncan said that some federal policies are partly to blame.
“We all have to look in the mirror and say what have we done to contribute to the issue,” he said.
A comprehensive study of 66 of the nation’s big-city school districts by the Council of the Great City Schools found that students spend an average of 20 to 25 hours per year taking standardized tests. Between pre-K and 12th grade, students took about 112 mandatory standardized exams.
The report, released Saturday, said testing amounts to about 2.3 percent of classroom time for the average eighth-grader in public school. Mr. Obama wants to limit that time to 2 percent.
The study analyzed the time spent actually taking the tests, but it did not include the hours devoted to preparation ahead of the testing required by the federal government, states or local districts. It also did not include regular day-to-day classroom quizzes and tests in reading, math, science, foreign languages and more.
In connection with the study’s release, Mr. Obama said federal officials would work with states, schools and teachers to “make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing.”
“Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble,” Mr. Obama said in a video released on Facebook.
The administration still supports annual standardized tests as a necessary assessment tool, and both House and Senate versions of an update to the No Child Left Behind law would continue annual testing. But the rewrite legislation would let states decide how to use test results to determine what to do with struggling schools.
Differences between the two bills still need to be worked out. Mr. Earnest said the president believes the legislation is “the appropriate venue” to address the problem but said it’s up to lawmakers to devise a solution, and he wouldn’t say whether Mr. Obama will insist on such language in the final bill.
To ease the testing burden, the administration will provide states with guidance about how they can satisfy federal testing requirements in less time or in more creative ways, including federal waivers to No Child Left Behind that the Education Department readily has handed out.
For example, some eighth-grade students who take high school-level coursework currently take both eighth-grade and high school assessments, but the administration will allow them to opt out of the eighth-grade tests.
Central to the debate over standardized testing is Common Core. The federal government doesn’t require Common Core, but the administration has backed it with financial incentives, and about 12 million students last spring took tests based on the curriculum.
The CGCS study reviewed testing for more than 7 million students in about three dozen states during the past school year.
“How much constitutes too much time is really difficult to answer,” said Michael Casserly, the council’s executive director. He said the study found plenty of redundancy in required testing — supporting concerns from teachers and other critics about the tests consuming too much teaching and learning time.
For example, Mr. Casserly said that researchers found some states and school districts were mandating not only end-of-year tests but end-of-course tests in the same subjects in the same grade.
“Having states and school districts jointly reviewing redundancy and overlap in their testing requirements will be an important step in reducing unnecessary assessments,” he said.
A “testing action plan” released by the Education Department over the weekend said too many schools have unnecessary testing.
The department pledged to work with states and schools on ways to reduce time spent on testing, with federal guidance to the states expected in January. The plan also said the agency has adjusted its policies to provide more flexibility to states on how much significance to place on student test results in evaluating teachers.
Aiming to close achievement gaps and assess learning, the No Child Left Behind Act signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 mandated annual testing in reading and math for students in grades three through eight and again in high school. States and local school districts decide which standardized assessments to use to gauge student learning and progress in those two subjects and others.
This past spring saw the rollout of new tests based on the Common Core college-ready academic standards in reading and math. About 12 million students in 29 states and the District of Columbia took the tests developed by two groups, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
Other findings in the council’s report:
• The most tests were required in eighth and 10th grade; the fewest were in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade.
• Four in 10 districts report having to wait between two months and four months before getting state test results. The lack of timely results means teachers begin a new school year not knowing where a student needs to improve.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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