RANT OF THE DAY
June 28, 2007 - A march against standardized testing.
The Louisiana NAACP is calling on parents and interested people to come to the State Capitol Saturday morning in protest of the state's new school testing requirements.
Ernest Johnson, president of the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says that the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education recently made it a requirement that students pass standardized tests in order for them to move on to the next grade, regardless of how they did with their school grades.
In the past, Johnson says there were stipulations that allowed students who failed the tests to go to summer school and continue to the next grade if they met the standard at some point during the year.Now, students who don't pass the tests during summer schools will not be allowed to continue to the next grade.
The truth about summer school seems to be in question. From Education World:
The Louisiana Department of Education website specifically states there are summer remediation programs and retests. (pg 3)Students who flunked the reading and math standardized tests administered in March will have another chance to pass the tests in July after attending summer school.
If they score at the "approaching basic" competency level or higher on the tests, the students will pass to the next grade if they have also met other school-district requirements. The state expects about half of those students to pass on the second attempt.
The reason for the march? It is estimated that at least 16,000 students in the state of Louisiana have failed the state's standardized tests, and have not been promoted to the next grade or graduated from high school. Most are from urban areas (For example, 63 percent of grade 8 students from the Orleans (urban) school district failed the math test, while only 10 percent from the St. Tammany (suburban) school district failed. Source: Education World) These are the very districts where social promotion has been the norm for decades.
