Advocates for poor and minority-group children are pushing a novel idea: standardized tests as a civil right.
The nation's major civil-rights groups say that federally required testing -- in place for a decade through existing law -- is a tool to force fairness in public schools by aiming a spotlight at the stark differences in scores between poor, minority-group students and their more affluent counterparts.
And advocates are fighting legislative efforts to scale back testing as lawmakers on Capitol Hill rewrite the nation's main federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind.
"Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don't have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year," Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil-rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the requirement to test all children each year in math and reading.
The civil-rights argument adds a new dimension to one of the most contentious education issues in decades: whether standardized testing is good for students. Congress is wrestling with that question as it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind. The Senate education panel is likely to begin debating a bipartisan bill this week that would maintain annual testing, but it is unclear how the bill will fare in the House, where conservative Republicans want to scale back the federal role in education.
Critics say the testing mandate hasn't done much to narrow the gap but has drained the joy from classrooms, fostering a testing fixation that critics blame for everything from narrowed curricula to cheating scandals.
"It's reached a level where people are saying 'enough is enough,'" said Robert Schaeffer, of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. "People are sick of the overkill of test volume and the consequences, ridiculous things like rating art teachers based on the reading test scores in their schools."
But civil-rights advocates don't trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged children if they aren't required by federal law to test and make public the scores of blacks, Hispanics, students with disabilities and English-language learners.
"I don't think you can dismiss the role that assessments play in holding educators and states overall responsible for the quality of education provided," said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive session of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group of advocates.
States and school districts that don't want to deal with the task of improving achievement of poor students complain about testing as a way of shirking accountability, Henderson said.
No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2002, ushered in an era of accountability by requiring states for the first time to test all students in math and reading in grades three through eight, as well as once in high school. Students are also required to take three science tests during their studies.
Under the law, schools must make public their test scores by groups according to race, income and whether they are disabled or English learners. Most states began annual testing in 2005, and the public data laid bare achievement gaps between poor children and their more affluent peers, usually divided along racial lines. No Child Left Behind penalizes schools that fail to raise test scores for all groups.
Teachers unions and others say the Obama administration has intensified the pressure around testing by prodding states to use student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Some say the idea of standardized testing as a civil right is "misguided."
"The main victims of this misguided policy are exactly the people the civil-rights groups want to help: teachers and students in high poverty schools," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at University of California Los Angeles. The focus on math and reading has squeezed out science, social studies and the arts from high-poverty schools, he said.
Tests don't address the social problems that poor children take to school or the fact that many start kindergarten already behind, he said.
"The idea that you can just ignore the conditions that create inequality in schools and just put more and more pressure on schools and if that doesn't work, add more sanctions, makes no sense," Orfield said. "As if it's just a matter of will for the students and teachers in these schools of concentrated poverty."
Civil-rights groups agree that the country needs to address unequal resources, and they want any new federal law to require states to take action to improve the academic performance of disadvantaged students.
A Section on 04/12/2015