https://coloradosun.com/2020/06/25/colorado-education-funding-testing-remote-learning-online-coronavirus-students/
When Colorado shut down in-classroom instruction in its schools last March, teachers, students and parents found themselves faced with a situation for which they were unprepared: online or home-based instruction.
Due to the lack of preparation for this educational model, most everyone assumes that students did not advance at the same rate they might have, had the pandemic not slammed the school doors shut.
Over the past 20 years, Colorado — and most US states — have been holding K-12 schools accountable for student growth by administering tests in reading and math on an annual basis. But the annual testing, scheduled for April, did not take place this year, for obvious reasons.
This creates an awkward situation for the state bureaucrats charged with tracking student growth and with shaking their fingers at the schools that fail to show expected academic progress among their students.
For the 2019-2020 school year, we have no idea what growth ought to be expected, nor do we know how much took place.
From a June 25 Colorado Sun article by Erica Breunlin:
How do you measure the academic strides a student has made since last spring or clarify how much they’ve fallen behind?
It’s a complicated question in a summer bookended by uncertainty, with the coronavirus having forced Colorado students into remote learning this spring and many districts still pinning down their instruction plans for the fall.
It’s made even more complicated by a precarious budget year as lawmakers made significant cuts to education while trying to fill a $3 billion budget shortfall.
Ten Colorado organizations — A+ Colorado; African Leadership Group; Colorado Latino Leadership, Advocacy, & Research Organization; Colorado Succeeds; Democrats for Education Reform; Education Reform Now Colorado; Independence Institute; Ready Colorado; Stand for Children Colorado; and Transform Education Now — submitted a letter to Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes earlier this month, urging the use of federal funds for a fresh round of standardized testing.
From that letter:
“We understand based on local district feedback that many students have been deeply affected by the health, economic and social turmoil over the last four months. While districts across the state stepped up to meet the challenges of educating their students through diverse remote learning models, specialized online curricula, created drive-through breakfast/lunch programs, and provided distance social-emotional supports, the outcomes of these choices are unknown.”
Indeed, the outcomes are unknown. So many outcomes are unknown during this pandemic.
So then, spend millions of dollars of a tightened education budget, and weeks of classroom time, doing standardized testing in reading and math?
From the Colorado Sun article:
The proposal has sparked backlash among another group that includes parents, teachers and their union, who insist that such a test would waste precious dollars at a time students need support for their social and emotional wellbeing.
Less than a week after the coalition of education organizations sent a letter to Anthes, an online petition on change.org launched to rail against that kind of assessment. The petition drew more than 1,300 signatures by Wednesday.
Denver parent Paul Vranas, who helped conceive the petition, said he would prefer the federal CARES Act money be used for resources that will support educators and meet the social-emotional needs of students who have endured trauma from the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 virus has amplified the challenge of having limited resources in our (state) to deliver education,” Vranas wrote in a letter to Anthes and the Colorado State Board of Education. “Creatively funding the delivery of educational and emotional supports is what our children need, not another standardized test.”
In fact, nearly all Colorado school already perform testing during the first couple of months of each school year, but these are not the infamous CMAS tests used to rate schools against one another. Instead, they are diagnostic tests used in-house to find out where each student stands at the beginning of the year. Students are notoriously able to forget, over summer break, much of what they “learned” in the previous grade. And of course, teachers typically have a whole new group of students each year, with whom they may be unfamiliar.
One of the groups opposed to state-sponsored standardized tests is CEA, the Colorado Education Association President Amie Baca-Oehlert.
“There’s no need to spend our precious, very limited resources to go to private corporations for testing. We need to trust our educators to do what they do best,” said CEA President Amie Baca-Oehlert, responding to the call for more state testing.
From the Colorado Sun article:
Baca-Oehlert added that it’s critical to make sure that resources “are going to the right places,” particularly as students return to school in the fall after experiencing trauma related to the pandemic.
The Colorado legislature cut $577 million from Colorado’s public education budget during its late, coroanvirus-delayed session, to be added on top of the state’s school “funding deficit” to more than $1 billion since the Great Recession.
As Denver Post reporter Tiney Ricciardi wrote last week:
“It’s a delicate balance trying to weave a sense of normalcy into the school year and ensure the safety of students and faculty.
“They’re all bracing for what could be the most unusual school year they’ve ever experienced.”
Can we somehow make the term “unusual” mean “unusually good”?