Time Out From Testing - Join the Postcard Campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama to End High Stakes Testing in Our Schools...

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Time Out From Testing and other organizations and individuals from across the country are launching a postcard campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama asking that she encourage the President to put an end to the use of High Stakes Testing. When she was on the campaign trail she had the following to say about the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Program:

“No Child Left Behind is strangling the life out of most schools.” “If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that.”

Thousands of us agree with her criticism. we need her help to end the reliance on high stakes standardized tests.

Here is what we need to do: On May 29th send a postcard to Michelle Obama with this message:

Dear Michelle Obama:

We want the same education for our public school children that you provide for Malia and Sasha. Our child is not a test score.

Encourage the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!

Sincerely,
Name, Address and Signature

Mail to: First Lady Michelle Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

White House, Washington DC 20500

Some of you may want to tweak the wording a bit. All that we ask is that you don’t dilute the main message of ending high stakes testing. Remember that once she receives the first 50 postcards, she and her staff won’t be reading them but instead will be counting them.

One way to ensure the success of this campaign will be to go viral and use our list-servs and Facebook. However, it requires that people go to the post office , buy a postcard and then write the message and address it. In this day and age we fear that will not happen in mass numbers. So we have designed some other ways to make sure we reach our goal of between 50,000-100,000 cards on May 29th.

For this we need the support of all our organizations to go into the community and make this happen!!!!

Here are our suggestions for success:

1. Set up tables in your schools when parents drop off and pick up their kids and get them to sign the card. you will need to buy them and put the message on yourself. Ask for a 25 cent contribution. some will give a dollar and some won’t give so it should balance out.

2. Ask teachers to circulate the cards and get them back to you.


3. Set up tables in front of the busiest stores on a saturday/sunday and collect signatures on the card.

4. Set up card signing at your local church.

5. Remember to take them to the office, family gatherings, birthday parties, soccer/baseball games.


6. Remember anyone can sign the card---kids, parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, relatives.

The important thing is that you keep a record of how many got sent due to your outreach. We will need a count sent to us at info@timeoutfromtesting.org so that when we hold a press conference on that day, we will have an accurate count.


We have very little time to make this happen but we know that if all of us pull together over the next several weeks it will happen.

Thanks so much for your time and effort,

TIME OUT FROM TESTING - FAIRTEST
Education Justice at Education Law Center
Citizens for Public Schools

Panel for Educational Policy "Puppet Show" by Elizabeth Rodd

This is a must-see video from the January PEP meeting...

Panel for Educational Policy "Puppet Show" from Elizabeth Rodd on Vimeo.

Lisa Donlan and Jane Hirschmann from Time Out From Testing testify at the Panel for Educational Policy Hearing, held at Brooklyn Technical High School on January 26, 2010.

Over 350 people signed up to testify regarding Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to close 19 schools considered failing. Each speaker was allowed two minutes to make comments.

If you would like donate to a documentary film that follows grassroots education activists working against the education reforms underway in New York City, please contact info@lmnopfilms.com.

My Opposition to Kindergarten - Second Grade 2 Standardized Testing by NYC Department of Education (DOE)

My comments to the District 27 Community Education Council regarding - "My Opposition to Kindergarten - Second Grade 2 Standardized Testing by NYC Department of Education (DOE)" got picked up by The Huffington Post via Room8...Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Good evening, District 27 CEC board members and Superintendent Lloyd-Bey. Many of you know me, but for the record my name is David M. Quintana - I am the former District 27 representative to the Chancellors Parent's Advisory Council and former Co-President of the Parent's Association of MS 210.

I am also a former student and graduate of District 27 having attended PS 97, PS 60, MS 210 and John Adams High School many, many years ago.

It has recently come to my attention that the DOE (Tweed Administration) is planning to begin subjecting students in grades kindergarten - 2 to standardized testing. I am vehemently opposed to this testing and will outline the reasons for my opposition, as follows.

• 1. School needs to be fun, exciting, and motivating for young children. Children need to read books they enjoy, discover how to solve math problems, learn to communicate and work with their peers, engage in science, civics, social studies, music and art, take field trips, and develop a capacity to imagine and think deeply. This does not happen within a testing environment.

• 2. Testing takes precious time away from teaching and learning. Also, teaching and curriculum change with this kind of testing because teachers and schools feel pressure to prepare their students for the test. Test prep becomes the curriculum.

• 3. The DOE bosses (Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein), if allowed to go forward with this, will store the test score data in their $80 million ARIS computer system and use it to rate teachers and schools, negatively affecting the quality of instruction being given to 5, 6 and 7 year olds.

• 4. I ask, what evidence do we have that all the test prep (that has been forced on children in grades 3 - 8) has done anything to improve their learning? The NYC and NYS National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP - a national test - frequently referred to as the "gold" standard of testing) results in 2007 in ELA and Math - and in 2009 in the Math NAEP - show no statistical improvement - NONE. (The 2009 ELA NAEP results are due in a few weeks - which I predict will also remain flat.)

• 5. Testing young children is highly unreliable due to the varying timetable of the academic/cognitive development in early childhood. It is unfair and potentially harmful to judge a child on testing tasks for which she/he is not developmentally ready.

• 6. Young children may not be able to meet the demands of a standardized test for a myriad of reasons: hunger, boredom, fatigue, illness, anxiety or simply the developmental inability to sit still for protracted stretches of time. And, as any experienced educator or knowledgeable parent knows - any child can simply have a bad day. Yet, if a child receives a low score, it may set up expectations for parents and teachers that this child is, and always will be, a poor learner. Such expectations can negatively affect their future learning experience.

• 7. Standardized tests have a long and notorious history of misrepresenting the intellectual capabilities of young children based on race, class and immigrant status.

• 8. Test scores are not perfect measures, therefore no single test should ever be used alone to make a critical judgment about a child. Yet, the DOE, has a long history of using single test scores to judge our children and schools, a policy that I fear will be perpetuated with kindergarten through second grade testing.

• 9. During this period of financial crisis, it would be an utter waste of money to spend millions of dollars on a testing policy that the research and education communities nearly unanimously decry as unreliable and potentially harmful to children. This is not the time to be taking money out of the classrooms to enrich large corporate testing companies.

I am urging CEC27 to thoroughly review this matter (further statistical information can be found at timeoutfromtesting.org) and issue a resolution condemning this practice in OUR NYC Public School system.

Thank you.

David M. Quintana

http://davidmquintana.blogspot.com

quintana.david@gmail.com

Meeting Date: Monday, November 16 @ 7:30 PM

Meeting Place: PS 124 129-15 150 Avenue, South Ozone Park, NY 11420

Read the whole story: Room Eight

Tell Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein That You Oppose the Plan to Expand Standardized Testing to Students in Kindergarten through Second Grade...

Tell Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein that you oppose their plan to expand standardized testing to students in kindergarten through
second grade. Standardized tests do not appropriately measure the complexity of a young child’s growth and development...

This is a campaign by Time Out From Testing to Stop Standardized Tests in Our Public Schools...Please help...Thanks..!!

Dear Queens Parent,

Please join our efforts at Time Out From Testing to stop K-2 standardized tests in our public schools!

Can you help us?

Below is a link to a letter (in English and Spanish) of opposition to K-2 standardized testing. We need parents to help us organize this letter-signing: make copies of the letter, have adults sign the letter, COLLECT the letters and then get them back to us. If you can help with this effort, that would be terrific!

We have found that parent-teacher conferences are a great time to get the letters signed. Parents set up a table in the school lobby (with permission from the principal) and ask parents to sign as they come into the school.

We also have a link to a resolution for SLTs and PTAs to pass and sign, stating their opposition to K-2 standardized testing in their schools. We ask that you get your school's PTA and SLT each to pass and sign this resolution, and then to give us copies.

Thanks so much and if you have any questions, feel free to email or call us.

Jane Hirschmann
917-679-8343

Don Freeman
917-750-7180

Parent Letter in English:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_parentletter.pdf

Parent Letter in Spanish:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_sltpta_letters_spanish.pdf

SLT/PTA Resolutions:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_sltpta_letters.pdf