Recently, Joshua Starr, the Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools (MD), one of the wealthiest, largest, and high-achieving school districts in the United States, went public with his idea that there be a three-year moratorium on federally mandated standardized testing. He is not fundamentally opposed to all standardized testing, but he does have a problem with forcing the issue right now on standardized testing when he feels that states and districts should be most concerned with preparing to implement the new Common Core standards well.
Starr is also opposed to the idea of using student test scores from standardized testing to evaluate teacher performance, hence why his county opted not to participate in Maryland’s Race to the Top bid and why Montgomery County does not receive funding through that competition. Starr is taking his county on a course opposed to his own state education department’s plans.
Starr argues, “A moratorium on standardized tests would give our school systems the ability to implement the Common Core with fidelity. It would also give the groups developing assessments aligned to the Common Core the time they need to get it right. These assessments will include performance tasks and multi-step problems. This is a vast improvement over most, if not all, current state assessments, which rely heavily on multiple-choice problems.”
Starr is not the only one to take a stand against standardized testing. News broke recently of a coalition of more than 130 Massachusetts professors and researchers from some 20 schools — including Harvard, Tufts, Boston and Brandeis universities — signing a new public statement that urges officials to stop overusing high-stakes standardized tests to assess students, teachers and schools. Elsewhere around the country, students, teachers, principals, and superintendents have been making more noise in slowly growing dissension against standardized testing.
Not everyone, however, sees standardized testing so negatively. Kristen Amundson, the senior vice president for the think tank Education Sector who was also a member of the Fairfax County (VA) School Board from 1991 to 2000 and chairman of the board from 1996 to 1998, wrote an op-ed response to Joshua Starr’s that recently appeared in the Washington Post.
Amundson’s central argument is that without federally-mandated standardized testing, the notion of accountability becomes just that—a notion. Ms. Amundon asserts, “My experience representing the diverse Mount Vernon area was that only the advent of national tests with real consequences led to sustained interest in our lowest-performing students.” While Ms. Amundson does not question Montgomery County’s overall level of student achievement, she does question whether this success is true for all strata of Montgomery County students.
For more on this developing controversy, please visit the following links:
