Teachers union wants to get rid of high-stakes tests

February 24, 2015

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CEA President Sheila Cohen and Executive Director Mark Waxenberg (Christine Stuart photo)

HARTFORD, Conn. – The state’s largest teachers union asked lawmakers Monday to reduce “high-stakes” standardized tests, like the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium or SBAC test, and replace it with “progress tests.”

“A child is more than a test score,” Connecticut Education Association President Sheila Cohen said, “and the time is now for the General Assembly to act by phasing out SBAC and turning to a progress test already in use in Connecticut classrooms.”

SBAC is one of two multi-state consortia developing assessments based on the Common Core State Standards, which were developed under the leadership of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. This is the first year the SBAC test would be administered by Connecticut school districts.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.

Comments

3 responses to “Teachers union wants to get rid of high-stakes tests”

John Hamlin

February 24, 2015

Another reason we need to abolish public employee unions.

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Mike Lyons

February 24, 2015

I would not support elimination of the SBAC tests — these are tied to the Common Core and are essential to establishing that our educational program is effectively teaching the new curricula. I have no problem with using multiple measures of achievement, of course, perhaps including the progress reports recommended by the CEA. But the problem with the latter is that they tend to be subjective and are used differently in each school system. Uniform tests like SBAC are essential to establishing baselines and allowing benchmarking among different school systems, which can give us a way of objectively evaluating the performance of our students and our school system. Without having that information, it becomes extremely difficult to identify weaknesses and develop plans to address them.

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JMB

February 24, 2015

Teaching is an interesting profession – there are a whole lot of people who think they know what’s best having never taken an education class. (For the record, parenting and teaching are very different.)

I believe this is the second year of SBA (no longer SBAC as they’ve gotten rid of the consortium at the end) and we have no idea what the results will look like. Oh sure we were promised some sort of non-specific data from last year but the testing company has yet to provide anything so teachers, administrators, parents have no idea how last year went.

I think I read somewhere that 45% of a teacher’s evaluation in Norwalk will be based on test scores. Would you want 45% of your job evaluation based on something you have never seen before?

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