Time Out From Testing, a parent group in NYC opposed to high-stakes testing and standardization in education, sent out a letter to its supporters describing the recent NYC Council Education Committee Hearing on the controversial new school report card scheme. Kudos to TOFT! Read on…
Today the parents from Time Out From Testing, representing every borough and every school with a grade A-F, came together at City Hall for the City Council Education Committee hearing on the school report card grades. City Councilman Robert Jackson chaired the hearing. We had previously collected close to 7,000 petitions to present to the DOE in addition to a 6 foot tall report card for Joel Klein, which read: Joel Klein's Report Card You get an F for: 1. Hiding that 85% of the school report card is based on test scores 2. Choosing Standardized Tests Over Meaningful Learning 3. Turning our Schools into Test Prep Factories 4. Misleading the Public About NYC's Poor Showing on National Assessments 5. Reducing Our children to Test Scores We listened to 3 hours of DOE accountability czar Jim Liebman testifying and being grilled by Council members. Council members were pretty hard on him and many caught on to his obfuscations. After Liebman completed testifying, Councilman Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee, asked that Mr. Liebman go to the back of the hearing room and meet with the parents who had petitions to present to him. We waited patiently with the whole press corps, but he sneaked out the back door and refused to meet with us! Numbers of us ran after Liebman and outside had a confrontation with him, captured by the press’ cameras and aired on last night’s news programs Liebman would not stop to talk to us. Instead, he ran away from parents, unwilling to accept the thousands of petitions that you worked so hard to gather! We then went back in to the hearing and testified. I am sure you will get to see what occurred on the news or in the papers tomorrow if they cover it in an honest fashion. Thanks to all the parents who worked hard over the last few weeks getting signatures and mailing them in. They are still arriving, both online and in my mailbox. We will continue collecting, but our work is cut out for us. The DOE thinks that they are unstoppable, but we must show them that we will be totally vigilant in preventing them from hijacking our children’s education with their excessive and high stakes testing scheme. We will be in touch soon about planning our next steps. Thanks for your continuing hard work! Jane Hirschmann