MEDIA CONTACT: Matt
Cardoza, GaDOE Communications Office, (404) 651-7358, mcardoza@gadoe.org or Meghan Frick, GaDOE
Communications Office, (404) 656-5594, mfrick@doe.k12.ga.us
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January 26, 2015 – State School Superintendent Richard Woods today
sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, members of Georgia’s
congressional delegation and members of the U.S. Senate and House Education
Committees about the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA). In his letter, he calls for a balance between accountability and
responsibility with regard to testing requirements.
“With the reauthorization
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act comes an opportunity to address
the valid concerns of students, parents, teachers, and communities regarding
the quantity and quality of federally mandated standardized tests,”
Superintendent Woods wrote in the letter. “As a nation, we have surrendered
time, talent, and resources to an emphasis on autopsy-styled assessments,
rather than physical-styled assessments. With the reauthorization of ESEA
comes an opportunity for a real paradigm shift in the area of assessment.”
“Instead of a ‘measure,
pressure, and punish’ model that sets our students, teachers, and schools up
for failure, we need a diagnostic, remediate/accelerate model that personalizes
instruction, empowers students, involves parents, and provides real feedback to
our teachers. We need greater emphasis for a federally supported but
state-driven formative assessment model that identifies the strengths and
weakness of students, coupled with a less intrusive, student-sampled or
grade-staggered summative assessment model for the purposes of state-to-state
comparisons and world rankings.”
“We must find a balance
between accountability and responsibility. We must give our teachers the tools
and trust to be successful or our current path to hyper-accountability will
continue to set our students and teachers up for failure.”
You can read the full
letter here.
