Teachers unions and conservative education reformers typically find themselves at loggerheads, but they’re developing a surprising alliance over their joint belief that testing requirements from the No Child Left Behind Act are too burdensome and need reform.
“We have to stop the madness of the overuse of standardized, summative assessments,” Mary Kusler, the Director of Government Relations at the National Education Association, told the Washington Examiner. “We don’t really care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, we’re willing to work with people on both sides of the aisle that are going to stand up for students who are in need and for the educators who work with them.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in an emailed statement to the Examiner that, “High-stakes testing has eclipsed teaching and learning in our public schools today, with students being viewed more and more as test scores, with less and less time devoted to instruction and to meeting the needs of every child.”
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Neal McCluskey, the associate director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said, “It’s really been a complaint since almost day one of No Child Left Behind. All its consequences are attached to standardized tests, and standardized tests have to be taken every year.” McCluskey says the federal government shouldn’t require annual testing at all.
Michael Petrilli, the president of the conservative Fordham Institute, said, “I think there’s widespread agreement that there needs to be significant changes [to No Child Left Behind].” He believes there’s too much testing, but that some kind of annual testing requirement should remain because of the data and transparency testing provides.
Before No Child Left Behind, the federal government required six tests in math and reading. Kusler said No Child Left Behind pushed that number to 14 tests. “The states added on additional assessments, the locals added on additional assessments after that,” Kusler said.
Lindsey Burke, an education fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, predicted that less testing would get support across the ideological spectrum. “Particularly on the testing requirement piece, education policy does lend itself to making strange bedfellows, so you might see some consensus among folks, the unions and others, that [adequate yearly progress] in particular hasn’t worked out well.”
Kusler stressed that the NEA was not trying to reduce testing so that bad teachers get off the hook. “This is not an argument around getting out of accountability at all,” Kusler said. Rather, the NEA’s focus is on getting “better assessments,” not zero assessment. She spoke about having a dashboard of educational improvement indicators, rather than just a single-letter grade.
One sticking point: Unions still are not ready to support funding that follows a child from school to school, even a public charter school. Portable funding was a high-priority for Heritage’s Burke. She said, “A very first step … in any particular reauthorization would be to create Title I funding portability.”
Kusler said that funding portability to other public schools is a “novel policy concept that does not work in actuality.” Funding goes through districts, who cannot easily shift dollars when a classroom goes from 20 students to 19, for example. She said it was too early to tell if the NEA would support a bill that gave them everything they wanted on testing but allowed funding portability to public charter schools. “We’re trying to keep as open a mind as possible so that we can allow policymakers on both sides of the aisle to come together to negotiate the best deal for America’s students.”
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee plans to hold a hearing on over-testing later in January. When it does, it seems likely that those in attendance will support reducing federal testing requirements in school. Rather than fighting, teachers’ unions and right-wing education reformers may coalesce in support of reducing the federal role in education.
