“I dream of the day when there aren’t any standardized tests,” Daisy Maass is telling me. “That would be an amazing classroom. We could have so much fun, and we’d learn so much.”
Daisy’s mother, Marlene Martin, has long been opposed to the proliferation of standardized testing in Chicago’s public schools. But only recently did she learn that a parent could opt her child out. The decision was Daisy’s as well as her parents’.
Nationally, opposition to standardized testing gained momentum in January, when teachers at a Seattle high school announced their refusal to administer MAP to their ninth graders. The teachers said in a statement that MAP “subtracts many hours of class time from students’ schedules each year.”
Daisy clearly follows the teachers’ line of reasoning. “I consider myself a good test taker, but I know some really bright kids who just aren’t, and they flop and feel bad about themselves. And then it reflects badly on the teacher—and it’s not their fault.
He may be fond of standardized tests, but one of his first missions here is to figure out how CPS can cut back on them. Barker says his boss, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the new CEO for CPS, has asked him to evaluate all the standardized testing in the district and report to her about it by April 1. A CPS spokesperson says that ever since Byrd-Bennett’s appointment in October, she’s “received comments by parents and teachers expressing concern about overtesting of students.” Barker says he’s seeking to determine which tests are “most appropriate” and that the goal of his review is that it leads to less standardized testing in the district.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, concerned about the “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system,” created a commission to study the matter. The National Commission on Excellence in Education, looking for something seriously remiss, found it: SAT scores had plummeted in the U.S. between 1963 and 1980. The commission’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
