Features

LOS ANGELES — In its strongest stance yet against standardized testing, the National Education Association on Friday voted to support legislation giving parents the ability to let their children skip the tests. 

“If you want to know how your child is doing, you don’t wait seven months to get the results of a standardized test,” said Judi Hirsch, an Oakland algebra teacher who introduced the measure. “You ask your kid’s teacher.” 

The teachers union has long warned against an overreliance on standardized tests, which are a cornerstone of President Bush’s proposed education plan and a key element of many school district programs. Bush wants the test results to determine how much federal funding schools should get. 

The measure directs the NEA’s lobbyists to fight mandatory testing requirements on a federal level. It doesn’t direct state delegations to lobby for laws allowing parents to opt out of testing, but it does promise union support to state-level lobbyists who do so. 

“The delegates have indicated that they do not want high-stakes testing,” said Mary Elizabeth Teasley, the NEA’s director of government relations. While the union doesn’t oppose testing in general, it favors using a variety of indicators to help schools decide whether children are learning. 

The NEA’s 9,000 delegates on Friday also approved a resolution encouraging state and local school officials to use several kinds of assessments when testing whether students have learned. 

Congress this year is expected to approve sweeping K-12 education legislation that includes mandatory state testing in reading and math. Every public school student in grades three through eight and one year in high school would be tested. President Bush campaigned on the theme, which has widespread support in both the House and Senate. 

Meanwhile, more school districts are mandating standardized tests as they move toward giving taxpayers a complete picture of student performance. Some tests, deemed “high-stakes,” even determine whether students graduate or are promoted. 

Across the nation, small groups of parents and students have begun boycotting the tests. 

Most recently, dozens of high schoolers at a New York City school boycotted the state Board of Regents exam in English, saying the time spent preparing for the exams could be better used for other school projects. 

Last spring, two-thirds of the eighth-graders at Scarsdale Middle School in prosperous Westchester County, N.Y., boycotted state exams. Similar boycotts have been staged in Michigan and Massachusetts. 

“I’m delighted,” said Deborah Rapaport, a Scarsdale parent who helped organize the May boycott. “It’s going to be one more thing that (school districts) have to pay attention to, that their own teachers are not happy with a testing-oriented system.” 

Hirsch said many standardized tests, which place children’s performance on a 0-100 percent scale, put an average student at 50 – a figure usually associated with a failing grade. 

“It’s just a total setup for failure,” she said in an interview. “We know poor kids, working-class kids, are going to do poorly.” U.S. Education Department spokeswoman Lindsey Kozberg said a standardized test score is an important tool for teachers and parents looking for answers about children’s performance. 

“It’s a source of information that every parent, every teacher, every school administrator and every educational policy maker in the country needs to have about student progress,” she said. “This data is what’s going to tell us what’s working and what isn’t.” 

In other action, the union approved forming a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, once a rival union.  

AFT members will vote on the partnership July 11. 

The NEA has about 2.6 million members nationwide. AFT has more than 1 million members, most located in urban school districts. Unlike those in the NEA, AFT members belong to AFL-CIO. 

——— 

On the Net: 

National Education Association: http://www.nea.org 

American Federation of Teachers: http://www.aft.org