Dive Brief:
- As the Ohio state school board meets and the Ohio School Boards Association Capital Conference and Trade Show opens, superintendents will join other education leaders to protest an over-emphasis on testing.
- The Dayton Daily News reports about 200 people are expected to be at the Nov. 15 rally, where they will deliver a message that state education policy is out of sync with the desires of Ohioans.
- Current policy gives more weight to a single standardized test than to a full year of classroom instruction when it comes to determining graduation eligibility, and superintendents are advocating for a change in the graduation and state reporting system.
Dive Insight:
No Child Left Behind mandated statewide standardized tests once per year in third through eighth grade and once in high school, tying school and district accountability to performance on those tests. When the Common Core State Standards effort brought new, more rigorous tests into the equation, long-simmering anger over the emphasis on testing boiled over, birthing the opt-out movement.
States are all in the process of revising their accountability systems and they need to get plans to the federal government by this summer. Now is the time for district participation in the planning process. In the meantime, the Obama administration has proposed sanctioning schools that do not get at least 95% participation on state standardized tests. The proposal would automatically move these schools to the state’s lowest performance level and require local efforts to boost participation.
