Today, you may hear some talk about a report titled “Taking Back Our Classrooms: The United Struggle of Teachers, Students, and Parents in North Carolina Against High-Stakes Testing.” The report is a product of Advancement Project (a civil rights organization), Advocates for Children’s Services (a project of Legal Aid of NC), and the NC NAACP.
As you may have noticed, this coalition opposes “high-stakes” testing in North Carolina. Curiously, they praise the new high-stakes testing program developed by the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a project known as the Accountability and Curriculum Reform Effort (ACRE). Report authors believe that the new ACRE tests will be “practical, effective, and multi-faceted assessments.” I suppose we’ll find out if this is true after NC DPI introduces the new testing program during the next school year.
They also dole out criticism to Republican legislators, business leaders, and others that promote a “market-based ideology.” As such, commentary on the 2011 state budget was inevitable,
This past summer, however, faced with a $2.4 billion deficit that resulted in a 12% shortfall in the state’s budget, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law that curbed some of the state’s mandated testing requirements. Overriding Governor Purdue’s [sic] veto, the North Carolina General Assembly approved a budget that cut $800 million in education funding. The reduction of required standardized exams was made solely as an effort to reduce education related spending– not in response to the negative impacts of testing.
I’m sure that you get the idea.
Anyway, staff from the three sponsoring organizations interviewed 100 teachers, students, and parents from Wake, Durham, Buncombe, Mecklenburg, and Guilford counties, but they failed to describe the method(s) or criteria used to select interviewees. In addition, approximately 605 teachers completed a survey distributed to NC Association of Educators (NCAE) members via the organization’s email listserv. The sample of NCAE teachers represents less than one percent of the total teacher workforce in NC. This puts it in the category of a convenience (and not necessarily representative) sample of the state’s teachers.
Advancement Project, Advocates for Children’s Services, and the NC NAACP received some help along the way. The author(s) of the report received assistance from the YWCA of the Greater Triangle Area; Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African American Children; SpiritHouse; NC Heroes Emerging Among Teens (NC HEAT); Parents Supporting Parents; NC NAACP Guilford County Branch; Fund for Democratic Communities; Mecklenburg Area Coming Together for Schools; NC NAACP Charlotte-Mecklenburg Branch; and Asheville City Schools’ Foundation. (p. 32) I see a pattern here! These groups trend, ever so slightly, to the Left. Why else would the report come with an Action Kit?
