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Alternatives to High-Stakes Testing
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Parent Coalition
Parents in the Press
Here's what parents of Consortium students have to say:
"I was elected to the school board in my district, and served for seven years. I've also served on the PA and PTA since my oldest, who is now 24, was in Head Start. I was the principal author of a manual titled, "What the Outgoing PA President Should Have Told the Incoming PA President," which was purchased by the Board of Education. Right now I serve as a supervisor for an organization called Literacy, Inc. As a result of all these experiences, I have become an informed consumer about public education.
Conan, who is my youngest, is the one who's had the most difficulty with public schooling, with getting motivated, wanting to go to school, wanting to learn. His first few weeks of school at El Puente, we saw a transformation in this young man. He has always, always had difficulty doing homework, doing school projects; every teacher has always said he has such potential, if he could only do the schoolwork. When we saw Conan coming home from school, and voluntarily, with no pressure, opening a book, doing his homework, it was a scary experience. At the first parent-teacher conferences, I got the most incredible report from these educators, not just about his academics, but about Conan, my child.
I sat in on the portfolio presentations. I wasn't sure what was going to happen. One thing that really blew my mind is that these are fifteen-year-old boys speaking about how they were learning, what they were learning, and how it applied to their lives. It was one of the most amazing experiences I have had as a parent who has been involved intimately with public schools in New York City.
I was always worried about Conan: was he going to graduate? What was going to happen to him? I wanted my child to be able to learn, to have a life he could be proud of, that his skills would be developed, that he feels that he's contributing to the world, to the people around him. We have incredible discussions at my home about what the kids are learning at school. The rigorous academic and personal development that's happening for Conan at El Puente couldn't happen at a traditional school, no matter how good that school is. It didn't happen at Brooklyn Tech for my oldest son. I know that Conan is going to leave El Puente able to compete effectively with students around the nation for college. I already see it happening. Don't take away his last chance to be enthusiastic, to be empowered about his life, and his education."
Liliana Lopez, parent at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice
Now that I am a school board member, I visit schools where they perform well, they pass the tests, and so I go to see what's going on with these kids who graduated. They've forgotten how to read. They've forgotten how to do math. They have a lot of problems, a lot of violence.
In my country I was a midwife. I believe every single child comes into this world beautiful and ready to be the most wonderful person. And the reason that our kids are not able to go wherever they want to go is because the system is preventing them from getting the right education. Why do we have to be penalized just because we're poor? Don't take the future of hundreds of kids away."
Amy Velez, parent at Institute for Collaborative Education
At Beacon Carl was challenged. His teachers knew who he was. They knew what he could do. He learned to rewrite papers. He learned to study in new ways. He learned to present things orally. And he learned that there's no such thing as a finished project. He never could get that paper back or that test back and toss it in the wastebasket, because the portfolio system stressed the constant nature of the work. As an educator myself, I can't stress enough the importance of revising. This was a gift to Carl from Beacon. He worked harder than I have ever seen a teenager work. Don't forget: he was a teenage boy in Manhattan, and he could have been doing other things.
When he was a junior, he took the PSATs, and he did terribly. We spent as much as we could afford on the Kaplan courses, and he did just a little bit better than terribly on his SATs. He cannot do these tests.
He was accepted to nine of the ten colleges he applied to, including Oberlin, Wesleyan, the University of Michigan, Cornell, and Brown, which was the hardest college to get into last year. He got in based on his grades; based on the very detailed, careful letters of recommendation he got from his teachers, and based on his writing, and what he was able to say about himself and the world. He was offered merit scholarships at University of Michigan, Cornell, and Brown. As a freshman at Brown he got three As and a B his first semester, and boy, was he mad about that B. At Brown, there are no distribution requirements, but he didn't take an easy load. He took Math, Economics, Biology and Philosophy. He is a very humanities-oriented kid, but he continues to push himself. He is self-starting.
That kind of motivation is the thing I am so desperate to see in my students. I teach at Rutgers University, the flagship campus of New Jersey's public system. I get good students. They've done well in high school. What they don't do well is think critically. I teach history, so they think I want them to memorize facts, and that I'm going to tell them what's important. What I care about is that they can Read, with a capital R, the world around them, that they can engage with their academic life, and with their life. Those are the skills that I teach, and I use history to teach those skills. I have to start at the ground, because they don't come with the kind of engagement my son has. They come with rote learning. They come with the ability to repeat back to me what I just said. Beacon gave Carl that kind of engagement. He would never have had the kind of success he's already had without an environment that was able to assess him in a more complex way than the Regents and the PSATs and the SATs."
Professor Jennifer Morgan, parent of Beacon graduate
His first semester, my son did a humanities project and worked on it every day for a month. At midnight the night before it was due, he was up saying, "I have to revise! I have to revise!" This is my first experience of a non-traditional school. Who knew? In a traditional school, you opened the textbook, you answered the questions, you regurgitated the information, and the next day you didn't remember anything. This is an ongoing process. This is critical thinking. This is getting my kid ready for life. This is a curriculum that is teaching towards a life lesson, not a high-stakes test.
Every kid learns differently. And because my son has dyslexia and central auditory processing issues does not mean he's not a phenomenal student. On his first report card, he got a 92 in humanities, a 92 in Math, and an 86 in Integrated Science. And he wanted to know why he didn't do better. What do you say to a kid who has struggled, and been tortured until he came to School of the Future where he has blossomed and he's not happy with a 92?"
Barbara Goldstein, parent at School of the Future
When the pressure is removed from forced testing, the mind of the learner is free to explore ideas, to think and read more deeply into a subject, and to learn a host of other skills that conventional testing does not even approach -- particularly critical thinking, communication, and creative self-expression.
Reading comprehension, memorization, and the ability to connect concepts are, of course, necessary no matter what the style of education. But life and learning are immensely more complex than the basic skills measured by conventional testing.
I have seen ACS students not only master rigorous academic courses but also produce films, compose music, manage a local teen center, repair homes with Habitat for Humanity, and win prestigious awards in art and photography. This is an educational environment that ignites a life-long passion for knowledge and self-expression...learning that mirrors the breadth and beauty of life itself.
Conventional testing, classrooms, and curriculum are not working for all children. We desperately need opportunities to explore other modes of learning, teaching and testing such as the Alternative Community School provides. Our children deserve the freedom to learn."
Kathleen Damiani, Ph.D.
We searched until we found Landmark High School. Landmark did not have a special education program... They had support services and a resource room and smaller classes. I was very concerned, as was my husband and my son, about him being mainstreamed. My son was very worried as to whether he would be able to keep up with the work... The teachers worked with my son so consistently, so committed and dedicated. Along with everyone else he was required to learn what everybody else learned. It took him a little longer, he needed a little bit more help sometimes, but because the classes were smaller, because they were dealing with portfolio-based assessment, and he had a lot of time to research and analyze what he was learning, he was very, very successful...
It was one of the most challenging and beautiful experiences of my life to go through with him the research, the analyses, the group work, the teamwork that he had to go through to deal with developing his portfolios. He has a black belt in Karate. He is a videographer based on the video classes that were taken at Downtown Community Television with Landmark... He worked for two years as an assistant chef. He's at the culinary program at SUNY Alfred, and he has been accepted to the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie.
If he was required to take a Regents exam, my child would have dropped out of high school... Take into consideration a child that has challenges. What is going to happen to the majority of New York City public school students who are predominantly African-American and Latino... when they are required to take the tests that the schools are not prepared to teach and... [if] their learning style may not be in that direction? Our children's lives are at stake."
Rhonda McLean-Nur, parent at Landmark High School
The point is that I've spent a large part of my professional life inside classrooms... I have developed an eye for what works and for what doesn't work. So what did I see at Beacon? Engaged teachers and engaged students, conversation, young people sitting in groups working on projects, freedom of expression, debate, a great deal of writing, evidence of learning on the walls and in the language of the school, teachers excited about what they were doing and welcoming to us when the director knocked and opened their classroom doors.
I could also tell that Beacon was attracting young, dedicated teachers who were committed to city kids and to urban education and who were sustained by the vision off the school... At Beacon [my daughter] would have a chance to reconnect to her love of learning, -- to read, to think, to write, and to act -- in ways that support what I want to call not test literacy but true literacy...
I am not opposed to high standards or to assessment... The question is what kind of assessment? What measures demonstrate real learning? Are we so sure that Regents exams are the answer? Could we argue that they are more constraining than enabling? Isn't it possible that they get in the way of learning because teachers feel obliged to teach directly to them?... I would argue that they demonstrate only one thing -- how well students have learned to take tests...
Standardized tests like the Regents are an attempt to certify that students have achieved a certain level of mastery in various subject areas, but I would argue -- and I am certainly not alone -- that these kinds of tests end up reducing mastery to a series of hurdles and right answers that often have little to do with actual competence in reading and writing or in subject-area knowledge. I do not think they are the answers to problems confronting educators in New York."
Sondra Perl, Ph.D., parent at the Beacon School
[H]igh schools that are already administering the Regents or know that they will have to administer the Regents... when they're making decisions about incoming students are looking strictly at test scores, because they don't want to take risks on students that are not good, as they say, test-takers. They're not looking at their successful work in middle school, their creativity, what they've been able to offer to their middle schools, their teachers' recommendations... High schools are saying, 'Well, we don't want to take those students because we know we need to have a certain percentage of kids that are good test-takers to be able to pass the Regents...'
I also hear from some of the young people I work with that... young people who are not successful test-takers and may have other problems, are being encouraged that maybe they should drop out of school, maybe they should look into a GED program, because schools are very concerned about what their record looks like, how many people are taking the Regents, how many people are passing the Regents. I think anything that closes the door to high-school education to students in New York City is not a good thing."
Elise Rackmill-Benenson, parent of two students at School for the Physical City, New York
There's an inequity here. the private schools are not answerable to Commissioner Mills and the Board of Regents, and they refuse. Frankly, and I think inmost cases correctly, private schools consider their curricula superior to curricula that are tailored to the Regents exams. They consider their teaching methods unsuitable for a Regents' multiple choice assessment, and they recognize that a few of their students are too lopsided to take five Regents -- not too lopsided for college, not too lopsided to lead useful, creative lives, but too lopsided for a a one-size-fits-all battery of standardized tests. . . . At St. Ann's [the private school where she is a teacher] there's never any worry that our lopsided kids will not graduate...
And this matters to me because my son is pretty lopsided... Are we just going to say to the kids, those kids, many thousands of kids, 'Well, yes, you do have a problem not being able to graduate from high school and everything, but we're building a lot of new prisons upstate. Maybe some of you could go to them. What are we saying? 'If you deviate from the norm in any way you'd better be rich so you can go to private school?'
I'm a dairy farmer... and I know that if you want each of your cows to give 20,000 pounds of milk with each lactation, you cannot just decree that they do so. You've got to check their nutritional needs. That's just the way it is. May I respectfully submit that kids cannot be educated by decree, either. They can't be educated by the pound."
Nancy Fales-Garrett, parent at East Side Community High School
Former school board member, District 15
Testifying before the Blue Ribbon Panel, 3/9/01
"I would like to share some of my experiences working for the Center for Immigrant Families. My job is to organize school-based workshops on culture, immigration and empowerment. When I go to other poor communities in the South Bronx, in Brooklyn, I hear the recent immigrants coming to the workshops, looking at me and crying. They say, "Lady, tell me, how are they going to tell me that they are going to evaluate my child by a test? This test doesn't say anything about my child. My child is coming back home with headaches, vomiting. He doesn't want to go to school. He's joining the gangsters at the corner. He hates school. " And I don't blame them. They don't feel connected. When I come back home, I see my child, who is fourteen years old, and I see that she has never stopped growing. She learned that at school. During the weekends, she goes to the community garden to work on her biology projects. She goes to the Tenement Museum to learn about the immigrant experience of the people who came a hundred years ago to the Lower East Side. She never stops learning. That's coming from her school.
Elected school board member, School Board 1
Member, Center for Immigrant Families
Speaking before the Blue Ribbon Panel, 3/9/01
"When we moved to New York it was very important that we find the right school for my son, who had attended seven schools in the past nine years. He was about to slip through the cracks. I knew that Carl was not going to test into Bronx Science, or Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech. He is a very bad test taker. He cannot perform on standardized tests. He never had, and it was something we were very well aware of. We knew we had to find a school that would support him academically and socially. Carl was a rebellious teenage boy. He was angry. He was a follower, and our zoned high school would have eaten him alive. Thank God for Beacon.
Assistant professor of history, Rutgers University
Testifying before the Blue Ribbon Panel, 3/9/01
"For many years, I've been an active member of the District 2 community. We have two older kids who went to Regents schools and totally fell through the cracks. When my youngest son was in the eighth grade, I visited every single high school in the book. It was critical that we find the right school for him, because my son has severe learning disabilities. In eighth grade, my son was out about 23 or 24 days. He had stomachaches. He had headaches. He was always sick, and he hated to go to school. And it was always framed around the test [the 8th-grade exit exam]. And all of a sudden he goes to School of the Future, and I have a child who is singing and dancing in the morning.
Testifying before the Blue Ribbon Panel, 3/9/01
"I am the parent of a senior at Ithaca's public Alternative Community School who, because of the freedom to learn outside the constraints of a conventional curriculum, has become passionate about learning.
Public Hearing on the Higher Standards for High Schools, Syracuse, New York, 10/28/99.
"I am the proud mother of a Landmark 1997 graduate. My son had a learning disability due to a receptive language impairment. Because he was slated to attend a special education program at a local high school... we went to visit. To my dismay, the special ed. students were designated to a wing by themselves. He was interested in being a chef and... this school had a culinary arts program. Children were fighting in the halls, doors were locked, the school was huge... Even though it was his dream to be a chef, I knew he would not flourish in this environment.
Joint Public Hearing on New Regents Higher Standards for High Schools, New York City, 10/20/99.
"I am a tenured full professor at Lehman College and a member of the doctoral faculty in composition theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. My specialty is the teaching of writing. In 1978 I founded and then spent 10 years directing the New York City Writing Project, a regional branch of the National Writing Project, which is the largest teacher-training network in the country. I've had federal funding to conduct ethnographic studies of writing classrooms in New York City and on Long Island. I am a Guggenheim Fellow who has published widely on teaching and learning.
Joint Public Hearing on New Regents Higher Standards for High Schools, New York City, 10/20/99.
"I think we also have to talk about what's been some of the fallout from the Regents' debate. I work with young people in Upper Manhattan, Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx, and I hear from these young people through my job a lot of what's happening in their own high schools...
Testifying at the Joint Public Hearing on New Regents Higher Standards for High Schools, New York City, 10/20/99.
"I moved down to New York City from our family dairy farm upstate because Kabir refused to go to the high school up there. Now, that was partly because he's African-American and he wanted to go to school with other people of color, and it was partly because he's learning disabled and they had already said that they were going to shunt him off into a special ed. section... [At] East Side, the fundamental assumption is that people are born with a passionate desire to learn, as Aristotle observed long ago, and that this desire, this curiosity needs to be fostered and reawakened if it's been stomped out... My husband and I made some sacrifices so that our son could attend an alternative school. We've seen him move from feeling -- well, from refusing to go to school to feeling that school was fun, challenging, and interesting...
Testifying at the Joint Public Hearing on New Regents Higher Standards for High Schools, New York City, 10/20/99.
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