Parents Ask Department of Education To Abandon Plans for More Tests

Parents fed up with the amount of testing in the city's public schools are asking the Department of Education to abandon plans to give students additional exams next year every six to eight weeks.

During a packed meeting at the Department of Education headquarters at the Tweed Courthouse yesterday, dozens of parents said that their children were already overwhelmed with the city's new high-stakes tests.

"Why be stressing our kids out with more assessments?" a parent representative from Washington Heights, Yolanda Santos, said. "These are little kids - too many assessments will not be conducive to learning.

Since taking control of the city's schools, the Bloomberg administration has started using standardized tests to determine which third-, fifth-, and seventh-grade students advance to the next grade. Unlike those high-stakes tests, the new bimonthly exams are to be used to help teachers figure out problem areas for students.

"It's like when you go to the doctor and say 'I'm sick' and then he gives you a blood test," the education department's chief accountability officer, James Liebman, told parents yesterday. "This isn't high-stakes testing, this isn't low-stakes testing - this is no-stakes testing."

Parents from Time Out for Testing packed into the monthly Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council wearing red buttons reading, "More learning, less testing."

After the meeting, members of the anti-testing group swarmed Mr. Liebman and questioned him for more than an hour. Even when his aides tried to pull him away, Mr. Liebman resisted and continued explaining the plan.

The tests are part of the city's initiative to hold schools more accountable for their successes and failures. In April, the city's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, announced a plan to start grading schools on a scale of A to F.

The most critical factor in determining a grade will be how students' scores on the state's math and English tests change from one year to the next. The new assessments will be used to determine in which areas students need to improve to score better on those tests.

The president of the city's teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said test preparation was taking up more time in elementary schools than science and social studies instruction combined.

"The plan to implement regular assessment tests - in addition to the other high-stakes state tests already in place - is simply formalizing what we've already seen, namely too much testing," Ms. Weingarten said in a statement.

Parents complained yesterday that the tests would take away from critical teaching time in the classroom and would place more emphasis on simply learning for a test.

"Every kid has strengths and weaknesses - it's about figuring out what each kid needs and how to give it to them," the president of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council, Timothy Johnson, said after the meeting. "To focus on these little five-minute quizzes is to really miss the point."