Others go further, arguing that whatever terminology is used, standardized tests to measure the impact of the pandemic are unnecessary or even actively harmful. Voices as prominent as former New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest educators union, have urged parents to exclude their children from testing. ‘State during the pandemic. “We don’t want to impose additional trauma on students who have already been traumatized,” Carranza said.
This week, the nation’s largest school system, New York, announced that parents should choose to have their children take standardized tests, which could result in a smaller group of students taking the exams, and results which will be difficult to interpret. .
Seattle High School teacher and writer Jesse Hagopian said tests to measure the impact of the pandemic were failing to understand what students learned outside of physical classrooms over the course of a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence.
“They learn how our society works, how racism is used to divide,” he said. “They learn that the government has not responded to the pandemic.”
Mr Hagopian said he believed the research on ‘learning loss’ was being used to’ support the multibillion dollar industry of standardized testing ‘and’ rush teachers into classrooms before he is not sure to do it ”.
Some of the recent research has been conducted by organizations that create and license academic assessments, but other research has been conducted by independent academics. Both types of studies show that some students have difficulty.
A preliminary national study of 98,000 students from Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent group with links to several major universities, found that in late fall, sophomores were 26% behind what ‘they would have been, in the absence of the pandemic, in terms of capabilities. to read aloud quickly and accurately. Third graders were 33 percent behind.
