Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced on Thursday that states could delay the use of test results in teacher-performance ratings by another year, an acknowledgment, in effect, of the enormous pressures mounting on the nation’s teachers because of new academic standards and more rigorous standardized testing.
Sounding like some of his fiercest critics, Mr. Duncan wrote in a blog post, “I believe testing issues are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools,” and said that teachers needed time to adapt to new standards and tests that emphasize more than simply filling in bubbled answers to multiple-choice questions.
Over the past four years, close to 40 states have adopted laws that tie teacher evaluations in part to the performance of their students on standardized tests. Many districts have said they will use these performance reviews to decide how teachers are granted tenure, promoted or fired. These laws were adopted in response to conditions set by the Department of Education in the waivers it granted from the No Child Left Behind law that governs what states must do to receive federal education dollars. The test-based teacher evaluations were also included as conditions of Race to the Top grants that have been given by the Obama administration.
Many teachers and parents have objected to these new laws. They say they put too much emphasis on tests and force educators to narrow their curriculums and spend too much time on test preparation. At the same time, schools have been scrambling to change their curriculums to match the Common Core, the new academic guidelines for what children should learn in math and reading from kindergarten through high school graduation. These standards were adopted by more than 40 states but have been the subject of increasing controversy.
Objections to test-based teacher evaluations fueled a strike by Chicago teachers in 2012, and as opposition has spread across the country, even those who originally pushed for the adoption of teacher ratings based on test scores have called for a slower timetable for implementation. In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the country’s largest donors to education causes, called for a two-year moratorium on states or districts making any personnel decisions based on tests aligned to the Common Core.
Last year Mr. Duncan said states could delay using teacher evaluations to make high-stakes personnel decisions. Thursday’s announcement allows states to delay using test results at all in performance reviews.
In his blog post, Mr. Duncan wrote that “too much testing can rob school buildings of joy, and cause unnecessary stress.” He also accepted responsibility for the federal department’s role in pushing states and districts too quickly toward new standards and tests.
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