This hurts:

Statewide testing measure passes in Nebraska Legislature

LINCOLN — Nebraska lawmakers decided this morning that the state’s schools should follow the rest of the country and give students uniform tests to measure their academic progress.

The Legislature voted 33-15 to give Legislative Bill 1157 its final approval. That sends the bill to Gov. Dave Heineman with enough support to override any veto.

The vote sets the stage for Nebraska to end a testing system that differs from school district to school district. Critics say that system keeps schools from being fully accountable to the public because a school district can be accurately compared only to itself.

But others say Nebraska’s alternative to standardized testing was a model that didn’t subject schools to rankings and allowed schools to keep a broad curriculum, instead of focusing only on the material being
tested.

I’m really beyond sad about this. The STARS project was a school-based, NCLB compliant assessment model that honored teachers and valued students. The State Commissioner of Education, Douglas Christensen is brilliant and courageous and compassionate – in short, he is a gifted educator.

Sadly, this news comes a year after Time Magazine profiled the STARS project, and it comes on the day after I received the latest issue of Edutopia Magazine named Dr. Christensen one of the Daring Dozen for 2008. Too bad the legislature was more concerned with the ability to compare one district to another with a test score than actual teaching and learning.

I’ve written about the STARS project before, and it was their success that gave me hope that we — on a large scale — prove that there are other ways to assess what kids learn than just the standardized tests. And I admit, on an almost daily level, I wonder how we got to this moment in time where our politicians have convinced so many that answers on a standardized test could ever tell us more about what a child can do than what the teachers who work with the kids day in and day out would tell us.

With Nebraska’s vote yesterday, it just got that much harder for all of us to hope for systemic reform. Thank you, Dr. Christensen for always fighting the good fight, and I can’t wait to see what you do next. And here’s hoping someone makes every legislator who voted for Legislative Bill 1157 take the tests they just mandated…. and I hope that they have to publish the scores too.

Update: Doug Christensen has resigned as Commissioner of Education for Nebraska, effective July 15th. He had served in that role since 1994.

Technorati Tags: nebraska, STARS, ed_policy