School suspensions

Why have accountability this year?

It was once said: Never let a crisis go to waste. It’s a lesson learned by many over the last decade or so. And if there ever was a year of crisis, the year 2020 is overachieving. Its cup runneth over.

As the covid-19 crisis continues, the Arkansas Education Association isn’t about to let it go to waste. It issued a statement last week, with an interesting headline atop the copy:

Educators Call for Standardized Test Suspension to Focus on Meeting Students’ Needs

Students’ needs? Such as, say, an education? We’d think that educators would consider education to be a primary need — if not the primary need — of their charges.

The union called on the state’s education secretary, Johnny Key, to stop “high stakes, standardized testing” for the coming school year. Also, the news release said the union wants to suspend the teacher evaluation program for the year as well.

If the state actually falls for it, this plan would be a one-two gut punch to any accountability among teachers and schools and school districts.

The state has spent years — generations — trying to finally come up with a simple way to show parents (and taxpayers) how the schools are performing. Arkansas has finally fought to the point to which grades of schools are easy to understand, and easily available. And parents have used this information to choose schools for their kids. Standardized testing is a big part of this effort.

But teachers’ unions have to defend even the poorest-performing teachers (because even bad teachers pay dues). So it should come as no surprise that the unions want to stop testing and evaluating.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education told the newspaper that, well, to suspend testing might result in the loss of federal funding. Which might perk up the ears of union bosses, if anything will.

And suspending evaluations “would have devastating effects on educators’ professional growth and development.” Parents, taxpayers, lawmakers, the governor — and everybody else who’s worked so hard over the years getting the state to this point — had better hold their ground on this. Or transparency, accountability and improvement might take several steps back this year.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that reopening schools — actually reopening them, with in-person teaching — is “a step toward improving public health — especially for low-income and minority children.” That is, those kids can’t lose another semester without serious consequences for their futures.

So this fall semester can’t just be one big day care. It must be school. And there must be tests, and evaluations, and standards, and grades, and report cards, and trig, and English, and history, and learning in the classroom.

To do otherwise would be to fail our children. And that would certainly lead to an even bigger, and more devastating, crisis down the road.