Parents — The Coming Conflagration

A little brush fire (verbal, not real) in front of P.S. 205 in Bayside, Queens, this morning may hint at a much bigger conflagration to come this year over test prep and excessive testing in the schools.

About 30 parents gathered in front of the school and cheered as speakers denounced the Dept. of Education plan to test kindergarten through 2nd grade students. DOE floated this plan in late August and was bombarded by criticism from testing experts and educators. They actually intend to give paper-and-pencil standardized tests up to 90 minutes long to kindergarteners. Is the chancellor kidding? “Has he ever spent time with any five-year-olds?” parent Martha Foote wondered.

For the last few years teachers have criticized the emphasis on test prep. Now the parents are getting vocal, and they are just getting started.

Karen Hubela, vice president of the PTA at a neighboring school, P.S. 31, came with a hand lettered sign that read: “Challenging Instruction, Joy of Learning, Sanity with Testing.” Her friend, Solan Tse, who came as well, said the school had changed from a place of accelerated and interesting learning to a “very slow level” thanks to repetitive testing drills that the kids don’t even need. (This was District 26, the top performer in the city.)

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum spoke on behalf of her brand new step-grandson to say OK, one developmental test for a kindergartener may be fine, but bombarding them with standardized tests? Gotbaum thinks “the administration has gone a little crazy.”

Assemblyman Mark Weprin said his 8-year-old was being taught how to game the test, not the content that the test reflected. Recently his son told him confidently that if he ran out of time on a test he’d just check off the C answers on all the rest of the questions. Why? Weprin asked. “Statistically C is most often the right answer,” the child told his dad. “I know what millions of other parents know,” Weprin said. “We are spending too much time on testing and test prep. And it’s not just teaching to the test. I mean cheating.”

Karen Alford, the UFT’s new vice president for elementary schools made it crystal clear that the union is concerned and opposed to K-2 testing. “That is developmentally unsound and just plain wrong,” she said, to big applause. It seems the union will have a lot of allies in this.

Tagged: elementary school, parents, Queens

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