Rochester Teachers Association President Adam Urbanski rarely admonishes Superintendent Bolgen Vargas publicly. Vargas and Urbanski usually have each other’s back on most issues.
But the RTA filed a class action grievance against the city school district last week, and in a phone interview yesterday, Urbanski was not so supportive of Vargas. The grievance concerns ELA and math tests that teachers have been administering this month, particularly in grades K to 2. Urbanski says the district has broken its agreement with the union regarding how the tests are administered.
Urbanski, who has been an outspoken critic of what he calls the state’s testing mania, says the tests have to be given to students individually because they are performance-based assessments.
“This is a woeful waste of time,” says Urbanski. And classroom management has been made more difficult, he says. Teachers in the lower grades don’t even have a proctor assisting them.
Also, Urbanski says the tests were riddled with errors, and administering them has taken more time than teachers are paid to work.
Urbanski says that the problems were brought to Vargas’s attention with some recommended solutions.
“I surmise that Bolgen admits that the district messed up,” says Urbanski. But Urbanski says that Vargas’s administrators are blaming teachers for the problems with the testing.
School officials seemed caught off guard by the grievance. “Our students in kindergarten, first and second grade are taking new performance-based assessments this month,” district spokesperson Chip Partner said in a written statement. “The new tests were negotiated with the Rochester Teachers Association as part of an agreement to eliminate thousands of pre-and-post assessments taken previously by students at all levels to support the [teacher] performance review process.”
The tension comes at a time when the University of Rochester is developing a plan to turn around East High School. Solid support from the unions has been widely viewed as critically important to the success of any plan that the UR tries to implement.
The grievance will now go before an arbitrator, and the arbitrator’s decision will stand, says an RTA official.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2014.
Union bosses hate reform and accountability. Until you decide to stop kowtowing to them — and Wisconsin has shown the way under Gov. Scott Walker’s bold and brilliant leadership — even the most modest reform efforts will meet with defiance and subterfuge.
A California state judge just today struck down teacher tenure and other laws designed to thwart accountability and reform. Parents, taxpayers, and the rest of the citizenry are fed up with the unions, and the tide at long last is starting to turn.
Always remember, Mr. Urbanski represents teachers in terms of their pay, benefits and working conditions. He does nothing to further the cause of better education for children.
How is testing Kindergartners “reform?”
In response to previous comments, of course there are times when teachers push back against administrative or political requirements out of banal self interest. The near universal revulsion by teachers to the new testing regime is not one of those times.
As a science teacher, I value giving assesments and believe that students benefit from the focus and effort needed to do well on tests. That is all well and good. The reality is though that the current pace and stakes involved in testing is actually changing classroom dynamics and outcomes in some very harmful ways.
Reformers claim that there is a mix of criteria that are part of the teacher accountablity rubric in addition to test results. In fact, teachers can be rated as worthy of termination SOLELY on results of state tests, even with high marks in all other areas.
More importantly, a students’ ability to pass tests is increasingly becoming a SOLE stumbling block to graduation, which will inevitably force an unnecessarily large number of students to start life with the weight of a non- high school graduate’ or “dropout” label hanging around their necks.
Because the definition of high standards means some will not meet them, having no fall back to the unyielding minimum requirement on a wide variety of tests leaves a much smaller than necessary window of opportunity. In the past a variety of options such as the “Local Diploma” existed for students.
The real problem with the increased amount and stakes of state and local testing requirement that is now all the rage is what it is doing to the classroom environment. The paramount purpose of education has become tests, and test results. Some students may respond to these new pressures in ways that improve their school experience. Most do not.. The likeliest outcome in the near future is an even further erosion of graduation rates.
A rebalancing is necessary away from so much high stakes testing and towards time spent on other more immediately meaningful purposes. Consider that experiments have shown students do better on math tests after 30 minutes in the playground oxegenating their brain than by directly working on test review,. This suggests the way to better aacademic performance is not always by pursuing solely academic results but rather by increasing opportunities to access the joy and focus experienced when pursuing tangibly puposeful activity.
Growing food, bulding houses, throwing a baseball, baking a pie, throwing a pot, starting a business, testing a hypothesis, writing a song, programming a computer— all of these are happening in the RCSD district now, but at far lower levels than in the past — when RCSD academic resuolts were better.
Testing mania is taking us even farther in the wrong direction. The sooner it goes away, or at least dialed way down, the better off students and this community will be.
I gather that the real complaint is that testing works only too well — i.e., it makes it impossible to ignore the unpleasant reality that some pupils and some instructors just can’t cut the mustard. So the naysayers’ solution is to slack off, so that everybody can be above average. Provide more fun time. Hand out diplomas based on social promotion, rather than demonstrated mastery. Judge instructors based on fuzzy and irrelevant criteria, rather than actual measured results. In short, revert to the status quo ante that leaves everybody in the dark about why our education system underperforms despite staggering investments.
As for the complaint that “the purpose of education has become tests,” well, yes and no. It would be more accurate to say that tests show whether or not the purposes of education actually are achieved. That’s a feature, not a bug.