Our schoolchildren are seeing tests in their sleep

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Almost every one of us has had the experience of watching a child, a grandchild or the children of friends suffer through the anxiety of continuous tests at every level of the educational ladder. SAT, ACT, Regents exams, ERBs and a host of others, all supposedly to measure what our kids are learning.

What is fascinating about the current talk about how to make tests fairer is how much confusion is being sowed by the so-called experts, who can’t seem to agree on anything having to do with which tests accurately reflect how much a student is learning. The current dispute over the Common Core program is a great example of why parents and teachers are in a state of frenzy over which teaching methods and which tests are the best way to evaluate learning.

The Common Core program was created to establish uniform standards for how our children should be taught. It has been adopted by 45 states, despite complaints from its detractors that it will result in national control of K-12 curriculum (whatever that means). There has been a lot of pushback in New York state from parents who are afraid that the new program will make daily learning even harder.

What is confusing is that in New York state, like all of the other states, the Common Core standards have been out there for two years, and now, all of a sudden, hysterical parents are challenging the program, with the encouragement of teachers who aren’t particularly happy with being evaluated. If there’s a battle going on in this state, there’s a lot of blame for both sides. The state circulated information on the Common Core program to schools many months ago. School districts and educators have known about the new program for the same amount of time. All of a sudden there has been an eruption of anger over an idea that has been adopted throughout most of the country.

To add to the heated debate, the SAT is now being revised to make it similar to the Common Core program. What that means, in plain English, is that unless the state figures out what standards it is going to follow, the new SAT, aligned with the Common Core program, will make it even harder for our students to get into college.

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