On Friday New Jersey’s “Study Commission on the Use of Student Assessments in New Jersey.” issued its Interim Report. (See today’s NJ Spotlight for details.) The  Commission  was created last summer when the Legislature was in the midst of a brawl about PARCC, the standardized testing consortium that is producing new assessments linked to the Common Core State Standards. The regulations attached to N.J.’s new teacher tenure law, TEACHNJ, mandates that standardized tests comprise 30% of teacher evaluations for instructors in language arts and math In grades 3-8. After a hard-court press by NJEA, which included calls for a moratorium on value-added teacher assessments, as well as pressure from anti-testing lobbyists like Save Our Schools-NJ and Education Law Center (both receive funds from NJEA), in July Christie issued a compromise in the form of an Executive Order: this year, only 10% of tests scores – not just PARCC, but a portfolio of assessments —  will infuse teacher evaluations.

As part of this compromise, Christie also ordered the creation of the Study Commission to  look at larger issues regarding student testing.

The country is in a tumult about standardized testing, fomented by the seething opt-out movement and current Congressional discussions about reauthorizing ESEA. Are students subjected to too much pressure from the onus of assessments? Are teachers? Do American schools devote an undue number of  hours of instructional time to testing? Is classroom creativity and instructional latitude squelched by the burdens of measurement?

These are all valuable questions. The Interim Report from the  N.J. Study Commission notes,

Within the last decade, the public debate regarding the issue of excessive testing (“over-testing”) has grown. Nationally, parents and teachers have related harrowing stories of the stresses and strains that their children experience in the name of “data-driven” education. Negative attitudes toward over-testing are manifested in many ways, perhaps most noticeably in the antipathy that assessments.

Unfortunately, these reasonable concerns about testing have been  funneled into a maelstrom of antagonism towards one single assessment: the PARCC. Sure, it’s new. Sure, the technology required is daunting to some districts. Sure, student scores will be lower because the tests are aligned with higher level standards instead of N.J.’s traditional high school assessment, the HSPA, which requires only a mastery of 8th-9th grade level material.

And, of course, test-taking is not relegated to the days when students take PARCC this Spring. For example, Princeton Public Schools, a district to which most parents would sacrifice their eye-teeth in order to afford the mortgages that buy admission, is ready to administer mid-terms this week and next. According to the schedule on Princeton Public Schools’ website, high school students will have half-days Thursday  through Tuesday and instruction time will be eliminated on all four days so that students can take these district assessments. That’s almost a week of school, plus whatever class time was devoted to preparation.

But no one is complaining  about this sort of in-district testing, which is high-stakes for students, not teachers.  Don’t these tests create stress for students? Don’t they compromise the purity of instruction? No one suggests that these midterms and finals and quizzes  are toxic and I haven’t seen any opt-out movements or lobbying  by school boards and legislators to issue a moratorium.

We should think harder about how much time we allot to testing and the cumulative impact on students and teachers. But this is only about PARCC to the extent that the brand has been damaged by education politics that have little to do with the way children learn and how we can best keep track of academic growth.