Joe Biden Made One Campaign Promise That Really Mattered To Teachers. He Just Broke It.

Candidate Biden made many boilerplate, vaguely general promises about education, just like most candidates (”Betsy DeVos’s whole thing is over”). But one promise resonated strongly with teachers across the country.

In Pittsburgh, on December 14, 2019:

Denisha Jones: If elected President, will you commit to ending the use of standardized testing in public schools?

Biden: (Before the applause had even begun to die down): Yes.

Last year, Betsy DeVos saw the wisdom of waiving the Big Standardized Test during a chaotic pandemic response. She had indicated that she would not waive this year’s test, but teachers were hopeful that a new administration might provide much-needed relief from the 2021 test.

Yesterday, acting assistant ed secretary Ian Rosenblum informed state education leaders that no waivers would be issued for testing this year. “To be successful once schools have re-opened, we need to understand the impact Covid-19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need.”

National teacher union leaders were quick to respond. AFT President Randi Weingarten said, “It misses a huge opportunity to really help our students by allowing the waiver of assessments and the substitution, instead, of locally developed, authentic assessments that could be used by educators and parents as a baseline for work this summer and next year.”

NEA President Becky Pringle was more to the point. “Standardized tests have never been valid or reliable measures of what students know and are able to do, and they are especially unreliable now.”

The value of the Big Standardized Tests has been long debated. But their shortcomings loom particularly large now. The tests, which address only math and reading, are very limited in scope; Rosenblum’s letter suggests states may choose to shorten the test, which will makes its scope even more limited. Rosenblum’s letter also acknowledges that where students cannot yet safely attend school, it’s reasonable that they not travel to school to take the test. That means some students either taking the test remotely at home, or not at all. Earlier this year in Ohio, in-person reading tests were administered to third graders; one in five students did not take the test. The level of flexibility allowed by the department means that there will be little chance that the results will provide a standardized basis for apples-to-apples comparison.

That comes on top of the many different sorts of pandemic impact seen in different districts. There will be so many variables affecting this year’s results that they will be essentially meaningless.

Rosenblum asserts that test results are needed to identify the “resources and support” that students and schools need, but teachers could provide that information right now, today, if only officials asked them. And one of the resources they need is time.

Teachers are driving forward this year, struggling through a tangled mess of disease and the response to it, one eye on their students and one eye on the pile of material they hope to teach while the countdown to the end of the year tick, tick, ticks away. Rosenblum’s announcement shortens the year, telling teachers they now have even less time than they thought they did—demoralizing news because they already knew they didn’t have enough.

Test results, gathered under lousy circumstances, lacking in detail, and unavailable for months, will not be worth the time sacrificed to collect them.

There’s further gloom for teachers here. Candidate Biden always carried the baggage of his time in the Obama administration, but given some of his campaign rhetoric, many teachers were willing to hope that President Biden would move beyond those policies. But the signs have been there; Ian Rosenblum came to this administration from the Education Trust, a pro-corporate ed reform group that just last summer joined with other such groups to urge this year’s testing go on. Many teachers had high hopes that this administration would be one where teacher voices were finally heard. But with this broken promise, a new day seems less likely and teachers are wondering if it’s time to sing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”