State Owes Schools Millions
From a Free Press Story:
Michigan may have to cough up millions of dollars in additional funding to local school districts because of a state Court of Appeals ruling that says they should have been reimbursed for the cost of keeping and reporting more data required under education reforms enacted in the last decade.
AdvertisementIn an opinion released Monday, a unanimous three-judge panel in Lansing said state officials—essentially the Legislature and governor—violated the 1978 Headlee Amendment by ordering schools to turn over data about students and student performance without providing additional resources. The judges said that the state Supreme Court previously ruled that if the state mandates any new activities by school districts, Headlee requires the state to provide funding for it.
As a school teacher, I can tell you that not only do these testing mandates cost money, they also cost enormous amounts of time—both in the classroom and among administrators and teachers. Time that might otherwise be used for teaching is spent teaching how to take a test, preparing the paperwork for testing (each kid has to fill out forms—or someone has to do it for him), test taking, retesting, and so on. Administrators spend time filling out forms, planning ways to meet the ridiculously stringent rules (for example, desks must be 18 inches apart), and gathering and analyzing data. And instead of inservices that might actually benefit the students, teachers are forced to sit through meeting after meeting on how to properly administer tests, teach students the “proper” way to take tests, and so on.
Because of the money linked to the tests, and the dire consequences for a district whose students don’t pass, the standardized tests have become the masters and not the servants of education. They were supposed to help districts figure out where they needed to focus their attention. Instead, they have become the reason for education itself.
Who cares if the students actually learn anything useful. All that matters is that they pass the tests.
Posted by The Editor on 07/09 at 02:29 AM
Education •
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