Chancellor Rosa, Chancellor Farina and Superintendent LaBoy,

We support our children and our school and believe that if the state, DOE, our school and our children are going to spend this much time, energy and money on the State Tests, that significant improvements must be made.

In 2014, over 550 principals in NY State, including PS41 Principal Kelly Shannon, signed a letter underlining their unease with these tests asking:

• How do these tests help our students?
• Why do ambiguous questions appear throughout the exams?
• Why are these tests so long? And many other questions.

It is time for real answers to these issues.

Whether we elect to have our children sit for the state tests or not, we urge you to engage parents, teachers and administrators on these issues and make real changes that help our children.

Specifically, we believe these tests should:

Be learning tools. Finding out our children received a 1, 2, 3 or 4 late in the Summer indicates almost nothing about what our children are excelling at and/or need help in and the information comes too late.

At our school we take tests to learn from them and these tests should be no exception.

Be tests that accurately assess our children. Even teachers and principals could not agree on the correct answers to ambiguous questions in both ELA and Math. Ambiguous questions do not accurately assess the intended standards. These need to be developmentally age appropriate tests with actual answers.

Be shorter.  Our children sit for the tests for at least twice as long—about 7 hours—as the LSAT (law school admissions), SAT (college admissions) and MCAT (medical school admissions). The new ruling on unlimited timing will only make this longer.

Not be a bully. The proposals that have been presented linking teacher evaluations with test scores makes no sense. Not only because they evaluate teachers who don’t teach math and English, but because they also create a teach-to-the-test mentality and take away our Principal's ability to do her job. The high stakes reality of these tests for middle school admissions has also made them a bully towards our children. And finally, we should be able to go to our teachers, who are our educational experts, to talk about these tests and their value for our individual children without possible censorship and/or the perceived threat that there could be discipline for doing so.

We are not against testing. Our school is constantly assessing our children and we support our children and our school. Your responses to these issues will show us, your constituents, how you support them as well.