Daily Astorian: Editorial: If Children are our Future will we Pass the Test?

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Bonamici offers a key strategy to improve U.S. schools

The national clamor for enhancing our nation's public schools continues to be shrill, divisive and unproductive.

World rankings of educational achievement regularly show the U.S. far below other countries. But the call for improvement is accompanied by widespread opposition to raising more tax revenue to be spent in our classrooms.

Instead, politicians who were elected using the slogan, "children are America's future," look for a quick fix, mostly by punitive "accountability standards" which frustrate local school districts and tie students' test scores to teachers' performance reviews.

The result: Professional educators, afraid of losing their jobs, downplay an emphasis on creative thinking skills, broad liberal arts and science curricula, the arts and music, and instead focus on coaching students to pass tests.

And every June, U.S. high schools graduate thousands of students who have learned to pass standardized tests, but whose true learning is questionable.

Appropriate testing can identify students at risk of falling though the cracks. But many mandated tests are redundant and duplicative.

North Coast Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici is offering a path to make testing more relevant to public school secondary education. The Support Making Assessments Reliable and Timely (SMART) Act is designed to provide federal help to encourage school districts and states to overhaul their tests to avoid redundancy, speed up the delivery of results and offer additional professional training.

"Streamlining and refining assessment systems will refocus our educational goals on student learning rather than test-taking," said Bonamici after recent visits to Knappa and Jewell schools.

Bonamici is not alone in this positive effort, which has been embraced by the National Education Association, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the Center for American Progress.

She has been joined from across the aisle by a co-sponsor, Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania. This bipartisan approach is welcome.

Today's students deserve to be properly equipped to grow into tomorrow's leaders. Bonamici and Gerlach offer a SMART step in that direction.

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