U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a letter to the top education brass of each state on Thursday, igniting a firestorm of angry responses.
At issue is a federal mandate that requires statewide summative assessments and school accountability, which were waived last spring by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many state education leaders wanted the DOE to extend those waivers for the 2020-2021 school year.
DeVos said no.
“If we fail to assess students, it will have a lasting effect for years to come,” DeVos wrote. “Not only will vulnerable students fall behind, but we will be abandoning the important, bipartisan reforms of the past two decades at a critical moment. Opponents of reform, like labor unions, have already begun to call for the permanent elimination of testing. If they succeed in eliminating assessments, transparency and accountability will soon follow.”
Among the recipients of the letter was Michigan’s State Superintendant Michael Rice, who had requested a DOE waiver extension in June after a first request for the waiver was granted nationwide last spring.
“We agree with the need to know where children are academically in a pandemic, but strongly disagree with the need to use spring state summative assessments for this purpose,” Rice said in a press statement issued by the Michigan Education Association. “Recent state law requires benchmark assessments in the fall and in the spring of this school year for this purpose. We will be re-applying this winter for federal waivers from statewide summative test administration.”
Whitmer also weighed in with her own statement, issued separately on Thursday afternoon.
“From forcing high-stakes testing on our young children during a global pandemic to trying to strip dollars away from schools in need of critical funding, Betsy DeVos has proven time and again that she doesn’t share our priorities for protecting and improving public education,” the governor said.
“This virus has had an unprecedented impact on our kids, and forcing them to take these assessments during a time when families everywhere are working around the clock to stay safe is cruel,” Whitmer continued.
Whitmer urged DeVos to “do the right thing and waive these requirements for our kids,” adding it is incumbent upon Washington leaders to assist students, teachers and families to succeed.
In her letter, DeVos stated issuing the initial assessment waiver was “the right call, given the limited information available about the virus at the time and the need to stop its spread, as well as the practical realities limiting the administration of assessments.”
She added her decision not to extend the waivers was “consistent with the requirements of the law” and noted assessments should adhere to the guidance of local health officials.
“As you’ll recall, statewide assessments are at the very core of the bipartisan agreement that forged ESSA,” she said, referring to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act.
According to DeVos, statewide assessments provide necessary measurements to determine students’ education performance.
“The data from assessments can help inform personalized support to children based on their individual needs and provide transparency about their progress,” she wrote.
“There is broad and consistent support for assessments because there is general agreement among the public that a student’s achievement should be measured, that parents deserve to know how their children are performing, and that it should be no secret how a school’s performance as a whole compares to other schools.”
