One Day in May

As a special education department chair, I believe the state testing is ultimately destructive to consistent serious study and time in the classroom between teachers and students. Around the schoolhouse, the Springtime is known as "testing season"and it is an accepted evil that teachers of Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts are in a pressure-cooker scenario for teaching leading up to tests, and are then given no structure or routine in which to operate when testing disrupts the routines of all stakeholders. We could sacrifice one day , statewide, when instruction shut down, everyone took a test in the morning, then we all celebrated our accomplishment the rest of the day. And the next day was back to normal. Anyone who wants something different than One Day in May must really hate children.

SB0757 2019 Maryland General Assembly https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2019RS/bills/sb/sb0757F.pdf This is the bipartisan bill that would have limited state testing to one day in May. The bill was killed in committee, never allowed to come to a vote. The lobbyists won; the children lost. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2019RS/fnotes/bil_0007/sb0757.pdf The Maryland Department of Education admits in Fiscal and Policy note that One Day in May tests could be created - but they argue that they would be more expensive (really?) and would mess up their plans for long “testing windows” and Chromebook purchase because the just must do all of the testing on computers. It’s a revealing read.