NPE Forms Coalition of Education and Civil Rights Groups to Oppose High-Stakes Testing

We, the below undersigned organizations, oppose high-stakes testing because we believe these tests are causing harm to students, to public schools, and to the cause of educational equity. High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish Black and Latino students, and recent immigrants to this country.

We oppose high-stakes tests because:

There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap.”

High-stakes testing has become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.

Many of these tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.

High-stakes tests are being used as a political weapon to claim large numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and to fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.

The alleged benefit of annual testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind was to unveil the achievement gaps, and by doing so, close them. Yet after more than a decade of high-stakes testing this has not happened. Instead, thousands of predominantly poor and minority neighborhood schools —the anchors of communities— have been closed.

As the Seattle NAACP recently stated, “Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and ugly history. It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start with politicians being accountable to fully funding education and ending the opportunity gap. …The use of high-stakes tests has become part of the problem, rather than a solution.”

We agree.

Yours sincerely,

Network for Public Education

50th No More

Action Now

Alaska NAACP

Alliance for Philadelphia’s Public Schools

Alliance for Quality Education

Arizona BATs

Badass Teachers Association

Better Georgia

Black Student Leadership Movement

Bronx Educators United for Justice

Caucus of Working Educators

California BATs

Change the Stakes

Chicago Teachers Union

Children Are More Than Test Scores

Citizens for Public Schools

Class Size Matters

Coalition for Justice in Education

Coalition to Defend Public Education

Community Alliance for Public Education

Community Voices for Education

Concerned Parents of Franklin County, Tennessee

Croton Advocates for Public Education

Defending the Early Years

Delaware PTA

Denver Alliance for Public Education

Denver Classroom Teachers Association

East Providence Parents Against PARCC

ECE PolicyWorks

Elizabeth Parents and Students Care

EmpowerEd Georgia

FairTest

First Focus Campaign for Children

Florida BATs