This petition laments the ever increasing amount of high stakes testing in the schools and urges support of legislation introduced this spring by Assemblymember Jim Brennan introduced two bills to amend the new teacher evaluation law (i.e., the APPR legislation). The numbers are A10451 (which prevents the law from going into effect for employment decisions until 2015-2016) and A10452 (which amends the law so that no teacher who receives a “developing” rating in all 3 subcomponents can be rated “ineffective” overall).

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English: High Stakes Testing Petition
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Below is the Text of the Letter

Revise NY State Teacher Evaluation System

Greetings,

I just signed the following petition addressed to: NY State Officials.

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March 15, 2012

Dear Governor Cuomo, State Education Commissioner King, Regents Chancellor Tisch, Speaker Silver, and Senator Skelos:

As a public school parent, I am deeply concerned about the role of state standardized testing in New York public education. Over the past several years, the amount of time and resources dedicated to state testing has significantly increased, and the stakes of those tests have been heightened to unprecedented levels, at the expense of our children’s education and well-being. As a result of these increased stakes, there has been:

• More teaching to the test with less attention to a full curriculum;
• More classroom time allotted to test preparation;
• Increased stress and anxiety in our children;
• More money spent on testing, and less on the arts and reducing class size;
• Increased time on tests, including for third-graders this year a full 90 minutes/day for 6 days over 2 straight weeks in April (180 minutes/day for students with an IEP).

This is unacceptable.

The recently passed teacher evaluation system will further increase these stakes. With 20% of the evaluation based on value-added measures of state standardized tests, plus another 20% based on either more assessments or the state tests again, there is entirely too much emphasis on testing. Furthermore, I object to the provision that a teacher will be rated “ineffective” if the state-approved formulas deem there is little growth or sub-par achievement on these tests or assessments – even if the rest of the evaluation is outstanding. This means that it will not matter if a teacher’s principal, peers, students, and class parents, as well as independent evaluators, give this teacher the highest marks possible. The test and assessment scores – which we know can be unreliable and inaccurate, as the deeply flawed NYC Teacher Data Reports demonstrated – will override these other measures. We fear one outcome will be excellent teachers leaving the profession and promising ones avoiding it; and we fear that those who stay will feel even more compelled to teach to the test to the detriment of our children’s education.

I urge you to rethink your support of the new teacher evaluation system, taking into account a groundswell of parent outrage. We want the role of testing and assessment to decrease in our schools, not increase. Test scores should not override the ratings and judgments of principals, other educators, and parents.

Sincerely,

(Signature)

(Name and Address)

cc: Mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio, , John Liu, Christine Quinn, Scott Stringer, Bill Thompson

[Your name]