Trib Live, the online wing of Pittsburgh’s Tribune-Review, published a scathing response to the federal announcement that the Big Standardized Test must go on this year. The editors are not convinced that the tests are valuable in the best of times:
They are stressful for many educators and kids alike. They put a year’s worth of pressure on a week of questions.
But in a pandemic year, the editors find the tests even less useful
Kids are stressed. Some families are facing eviction or housing issues. Many more are facing an epic hunger crisis that is stretching food banks to their limits. Even in families that have managed to weather the pandemic fairly well, learning has been disrupted in ways large and small, and in degrees hard to measure.
This does not seem like the formula for accurately measuring what a kid does or doesn’t know.
It’s powerful editorial, bucking the trend of newspaper editors insisting that we need these tests this year.
