OEA on the Common Core State Standards
OEA Supports Careful Implementation of Common Core State Standards
OEA supports careful implementation of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics as an initiative that can engage students in a coherent, challenging curriculum to help them succeed at college and careers.
OEA Demands Essential Resources and Expanded Support from State and Local Policy Makers for the Successful Implementation of Common Core State Standards
OEA calls on Ohio’s state and local education policy makers and administrators to allocate more funding and expanded services to ensure the successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics, which offer a robust and challenging curriculum to prepare students for college and careers.
OEA Demands a Moratorium on Outdated, Excessive State Testing
OEA demands immediate passage of legislation and administrative rules to end the testing of students on the existing, outdated academic content standards.
OEA’s members care deeply about students and Ohio’s future, which means we expect students to stretch their learning potential. This is why we support the high expectations of Ohio’s new learning standards, which include the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics. Members also believe that assessment of student learning is a fundamental condition for effective education. When the purpose is to inform instruction and shape local policy, the instruments should be credible measures of student understanding and appropriate for students’ developmental status. Test results may be useful if educators are able to make sense of the findings and put them to productive use.
Our commitments, however, have run up against state and national mandates with very short timelines. Taken together, these mandates are congesting and confounding our work with students and their families. In particular, the testing of Ohio’s children has proliferated beyond reason, severely displacing instructional time and channeling precious-few funds to testing companies and the technologies of testing. Recent reports from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) demonstrate that a nation cannot test its way to higher international student achievement rankings. However, Ohio’s policymakers continue to pile test upon test on public schools under the dubious assumption that testing is the way to higher student achievement and the path to college and career.
Rather than sampling student understandings and skills in context and using the results to inform individual student academic growth, Ohio seems to be seeking to standardize learning through more standardized testing. The evidence is abundant. First, tests are being used for rating, ranking, rewarding and punishing, none of which is supported by research but all of which appear to serve some illusive market function. To wit:
- a State Board of Education proposal would rank students to track them into college or careers through the use of ten end-of-course exams and differentiated diplomas based on grades and test scores;
- kindergarten through third-grade students are now being tested for the purpose of tracking reading instruction and for promoting them to the fourth grade or retaining them in third grade;
- the unfolding school and district report card would rank and compare schools in significant part on test scores; and
- Ohio’s teacher and principal evaluation systems seek to rank teachers and principals through the high-stakes use of test results in the form of value-added data and student growth measures in the teacher and principal evaluation system with little or no research to support this.
Second, policy makers are failing to consider whether schools have the technological capacity to administer the tests required for the new learning standards and the proposed end-of-course exams. These assessments will require computers and bandwidth in excess of what most schools can provide, and the anticipated costs for gear-up and maintenance are far greater than what the state has so far offered in funding.
Third, virtually no consideration appears to have been given to instructional time that will be displaced by test preparation and differentiated scheduling of students to free-up facilities for testing. And, finally, no allocations have been made to allow teachers and principals adequate free-from-student-contact time so they can satisfactorily analyze and apply findings to instructional purpose. This will render assessment outcomes useless except for ranking, rating, rewarding, and blaming.