Washington – President Barack Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results. Too much testing makes education boring for kids, he said.
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“Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C.
Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that “everybody agrees makes sense” and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.
At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate.
“One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you’re not learning about the world, you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math,” the president said. “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting.”
“And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in,” Obama said. “They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.”
The president endorsed the occasional administering of standardized tests to determine a “baseline” of student ability. He said his daughters Sasha, 9, and Malia, 12, recently took a standardized test that didn’t require advance preparation. Instead, he said, it was just used as a tool to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses. The girls attend the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington.
Obama, who has been pushing his education agenda all month, has expressed concern that too many schools will be unable to meet annual proficiency standards under the No Child Left Behind law this year. The standards are aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014, a goal now widely seen as unrealistic.
The Obama administration has proposed replacing those standards with a less prescriptive requirement that by 2020 all students graduating from high school should be ready for college or a career.
Obama wants Congress to send him a rewrite of the 2001 law before the start of a new school year this fall. Although his education secretary, Arne Duncan, has been working hard with lawmakers of both parties, the deadline may be unrealistic with Congress focused on the budget and the economy. Congressional Republicans also look unwilling to sign off on Obama’s plans to increase spending on education.
Latino students make up one in five of all students in prekindergarten through high school in the U.S. but lag far behind whites in educational attainment, with less than one in three graduating from high school, according to federal Education Department figures. Obama emphasized to his largely Hispanic audience the importance of staying in school and he noted that more and more jobs will require advanced degrees.
Obama also made a plug Monday for the use of technology in classrooms, revealing that he himself has an iPad.
He turned back a plea from one questioner to grant a special protected status to students who are in the country illegally in order to prevent them from getting deported. Obama said it wouldn’t be appropriate because that status has traditionally been reserved for immigrants fleeing persecution or disaster.
The president did pledge to keep working to pass the Dream Act, which would give illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children a chance to gain legal status if they enroll in college or the military. The legislation passed the House but failed in the Senate in December; it now faces even longer odds in Congress with the House controlled by Republicans.
Say “NO” to the Dream Act!
Say “NO” to illegal immigrants gaining Citizenship.
Say “NO” to political appointees and/or staff that cheat on Taxes!
This Administration is so crooked, it’s a sad joke!
This from a man who benefited from affirmative action, and still won’t release his college transcripts.
How about a school curriculum that would appeal to children of all ages? How about grand theft auto and other such exciting video games? How about some drug and alcohol parties in high school? How about keeping things real – as some cultures are wont to do? How about teaching real marketable skills in gang formation and instigator?
Now that is a schedule I thing every public school student is interested in!!
IDIOTS!!
Wow. I’m finally impressed. At least on education and testing, he makes perfect sense. It’s the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. IOW – between motivating a student by forcing him to take tests, or motivating a child because he/she is genuinely interested in and curious about the subject. Any teacher can assign test after test after test and destroy a child’s love of learning. It takes a special school and special teachers to spark a child’s curiosity and make him WANT to learn. Now that’s an art, and Obama seems to get it. Read the top expert, Alfie Kohn, to learn more. Google his name. His articles are amazing. alfiekohn.org is his website. He is one of the top pedagogy thinkers and writers in the world, and a true expert on how to improve our schools.
If you think the yeshivas are any better, you are sorely mistaken. Often they’re worse. Boring lessons, too many tests and insufferable repetition of facts is only half the problem. Do you want to know the ugliest truth that the yeshivas don’t want you to know? They’re beating up the kids. Seriously. And some are doing it with the full approval of the parents. People like you who read Vos Iz Neias. Your kids and grandkids go to very frum yehivas and there is often physical punishment and abuse in these schools. Not all yeshivas. But enough so that you should be very alarmed. How do I know? My son told me. I got him out of there pronto. Do your kids tell YOU the truth? What are you going to do about it?
Mr. Obama may have some insight into a difficult process which we know quite well he was a very involved learner and participant. Testing is useful but to learn for sake of test taking is to require academia to overrule the art of exploration and discovery in your own educational process.
President Obama is correct. “No Child Left Behind” should have been called “No Child Left Untested”. While there is a role for standardized tests, their importance has been blown way out of proportion. Thank you, President Obama, for restoring some sanity here.
Brilliant solution! Since children are bombing on standardized tests, let’s just cut back on testing, and things won’t look so bleak! That’s ever so much easier than just teaching them to read…
Perhaps they should send these children to technical education or trade schools instead. They do poorly on standardized testing because people with lazy cultures do not do well in rigorous academic environments. Do you hear Indian or Chinese students complaining about this problem?
Getting past the ritualized Obama-bashing there’s something worth looking at here. My wife works in Policy & Data Analysis at a large school district, so I get a lot of this over the dinner table.
With NCLB schools are forced to teach to the test with the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to let kids drop out. A child who is struggling lowers test scores. Lowering test scores means defunding the school which further lowers test scores.
Since their existence depends pretty much entirely on test scores schools cannot afford to educate. Any moment that’s taken away from memorizing a fact to be regurgitated on the tests is wasted. That means critical thinking, exploration, creativity and integrating what you’ve been taught with other things you’ve learned must be actively discouraged.
Friends who teach at universities have seen the effects. Freshmen and sophomores are good at memorizing lists of facts which they could look up. They have real trouble writing an essay, analyzing something they’ve read, researching a subject or problem solving.
PMO, we do agree.. but I should have not taken the politcally correct route and simply said that most of America’s educational issues are in minority areas. The use of inner city was to vague. Regretably these areas when totaled up represent a huge amount of America’s student base and future. My issue is with how do we break the never ending cycle that plagues these areas and impacks on education. Places where violence, drugs, criminal activity, a distain for authority, one parent families, young girls having babies and being celebrated by their families. This is not a new problem but one of a continuing nature. I have seen it my entire life in these areas with very little improvement if anything only getting worse.
America will succeed in educating those who want it, but how do we get thru to those that choose to live in such horrible ways. I did say choose because there is a real world beyond their neigborhoods that they refuse to accept. We can not and should not ever lower the bar to accomodate this element.