Do students need a bill of rights when it comes to standardized tests? As schools enter end-of-the-year testing season, tests are on the minds of students, teachers and parents. The liberal Center for American Progress is capitalizing on the situation by calling for a Testing Bill of Rights.
“The Testing Bill of Rights outlines the need to accurately measure student learning in a way that is useful for parents and teachers and less burdensome for students,” the Center for American Progress Action War Room said in an email Thursday. “It is also focused on the goal of ensuring tests serve as a meaningful tool to identify learning gaps and areas of improvement to make sure every child has an opportunity to be ready for college or the workforce.”
The testing bill of rights includes rights for students, teachers and parents. For students, it says they have the right to “tests that provide an objective measure of progress toward college-and career-readiness” and “an education free of excessive test prep,” among other rights. It says teachers have the right to “have test scores be only one of an array of measures of student learning in accountability systems” and “have their personally identifiable information protected.”
Parents would have the right to “clear, comparable data about school performance” and “know the amount of instructional time being used to deliver and prepare for standardized tests, as well as the purpose and timing of standardized tests.”
CAP launched the testing bill of rights in partnership with the National PTA and Educators 4 Excellence, among other organizations.
“Tests should be used to inform instruction, provide parents and communities with information about student progress and allow teachers to diagnose and help their students. Instead of opting out of assessments altogether, we should work to make them better, fairer and fewer,” the CAP email said.
Under current law, the federal government requires students to be tested 17 times throughout their K-12 student career. A major new education law signed in December 2015 kept that requirement in place but reduced the focus on testing when it comes to analyzing school success. The average student takes eight standardized tests per year, but only two of those are federally required.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who chairs the senate education committee, says the federally required tests are important “so we can know how our children are doing.” But he defends the new education law, because it “restore[s] back to the classroom teachers, local school boards and communities, the responsibility for what to do about those tests.” The new law gives states funds to audit their testing regimes to help determine which tests are unnecessary.
President Obama’s new secretary of education, John King, agrees with Alexander that tests are important but must be reformed. “At too many schools, there are unnecessary tests without a clear purpose,” King said in February. “Good assessments can be part of great learning experiences. But simplistic or poorly constructed tests just take away from critical learning time without providing useful information.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
