PBS is out with a truly awful report on testing/opt out/Common Core. You can watch it here and read one takedown here.

I’m not going to do a full takedown, but I’ll highlight a few points that weren’t made by Will Ragland.

1. Hagopian says testing is a multi-billion dollar industry. That’s true but overwrought and misleading. We have 50 million kids in school–spend $20 a kid per year and you’re at a billion. Yes, we spend billions on evaluating how well kids are learning. That’s far less than 1% of our total education dollars, in order to offer some evaluation of how our system is doing. Seems like a perfectly reasonable amount to me (if anything, it’s too little, and our limited spending on assessment has resulted in some of the poor quality tests we’ve seen over the years). Saving that <<1% wouldn’t really do anything to reduce class sizes or boost teacher salaries or whatever else Hagopian would like us to do, even if we cut testing expenses to 0.
2. There’s an almost farcically absurd analogy that testing proponents think a kid with hypothermia just needs to have his temperature taken over and over again, whereas teachers just know to wrap the kid in the blanket. First of all, given horrendous outcomes for many kids, it seems like at least a handful of educators (or perhaps more accurately, the system as a whole) has neglected their blanketing duties more often than we’d care to note. Second, these test data are used in dozens of ways to help support and improve schools, especially in states that have waivers (which, admittedly, Washington is not one).
3. Complaining about a test-and-punish philosophy in Washington State is pretty laughable, since there’s no exit exam for kids [CORRECTION: there appears to be some new exit exam requirements being rolled out in the state, though students did not opt out of these exams; apologies that I did not catch these earlier; I was referring to old data], no high-stakes teacher evaluation, and less accountability for schools than there was during the NCLB era (though parents did get a letter about their school’s performance …). Who, exactly, is being punished, and how?
4. Finally, the report lumps together Common Core with all kinds of things that are not related to Common Core, such as the 100+ standardized test argument and the MAP test. Common Core says literally nothing at all about testing, and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with a district-level benchmark test.

It shouldn’t be asking that much for a respected news organization to get very basic details about major education policies that have existed for 4+ year correct. Instead, we get misleading, unbalanced nonsense that will contribute to the tremendous levels of misinformation we see among voters about education policy.