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Hooray! Let’s hear it for more standardized testing! Go Bridgeport!

Sep 25

jonpeltoBridgeport, Education Reform, Malloy, Mayor Bill Finch, Paul Vallas, Standardized Testing Bridgeport, Malloy, Paul Vallas, Standardized Testing 18 Comments

It is hard to imagine that Team Paul Vallas could do a better job revealing their true stripes, again.

Yesterday, Sandra Kase, Paul Vallas’ “Chief Administrative Officer,” sent out a memo entitled “prime time for student learning.”

No, the memo was not about expanding instructional time, nor was it about broadening students’ horizons by bringing back some of the missing “specials,” nor was it about enhancing the schools bilingual program, not was it about undoing the damage to the school system’s special education programs.  It was the instructions about the next round of standardized testing.

Kase writes;

“There will be another administration of the benchmark testing in English Language Arts and Mathematics that will mirror the CMT and CAPT examinations. These tests will be administered to all students in Grades 3-11 beginning the week of October 1, 2012.”

So starting next Monday, learning will STOP and testing will begin, again, in Bridgeport’s public schools.

Last Spring, Vallas ordered a round of standardized tests for all the students of Bridgeport.

The results were supposed to help guide summer school decisions, but the results never showed up in time.  In fact, last year’s test results were never used for any of their stated purposes. And we still don’t know how much money was wasted on those wasted tests.  But they did have the seal of the City of Bridgeport printed on the test forms so that was cool.

Now, Kase is announcing that its test time again and add, that the standardized tests will “mirror the CMT and CAPT examinations.”

Mirror the CMTs?

Certainly Kase recalls that last June 13th, Paul Vallas, education reformer extraordinaire, was very critical of the CMT and CAPT tests, in an interview with Reuters News.

At the time, Vallas criticized the massive test format saying, “the assessment systems are not reliable…They need to be more sophisticated, more accountable, more fair,” and that he favors, “a series of abbreviated standardized tests every six weeks, all year, so teachers can monitor student progress and adjust accordingly.”

So what are they doing in Bridgeport this year… three more rounds of large standardized tests that “mirror the CMT and CAPT examinations!”

And Team Vallas has the chutzpah to entitle the memo, Prime time for student learning.”

If it wasn’t so incredibly wasteful, so incredibly stupid and so incredibly unfair, it would actually be funny.

These $200,000 a year corporate reformers, brought in to “turnaround” Bridgeport…

And their solution is to go from wasting two weeks a year on standardized testing, to eight weeks a year and counting.

But as Governor Malloy so elegantly put it, he doesn’t have a problem with standardized testing, as long as the test scores go up.

It is time for parents and supporters of public education to fight back.

Here is the link to the new anti-standardized testing petition being circulated by the Connecticut Chapter of Parents Across America.

http://www.change.org/petitions/reduce-the-use-of-standardized-testing-in-connecticut

As a tribute to Team Vallas’ effort to destroy public education in Bridgeport, take 30 minutes out of your schedule today, and send the petition link to everyone you know.  Then follow-up with an email or a call to urge them to sign it and pass it on.

A “Prime time for student learning?”

To Sandra Kase, Chief Administrative Officer,

Here is a quote to put up on your wall…

“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

“1984” by George Orwell

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