New Newsworks Column: NJEA and SOS-NJ's Anti-PARCC Campaign Has Nothing to do with Kids

It starts here:

The politics of standardized testing has kicked into overdrive in New Jersey. Last Friday the “Study Commission on the Use of Student Assessments in New Jersey” issued its Interim Report. Earlier this week, New Jersey Education Association and Save Our Schools-NJ released a “survey” on state standards and national assessments. Yesterday NJ Spotlight reported that a new coalition called We Raise NJ is “hoping to ratchet down the volume of the argument” about whether the new PARCC standardized tests are over-stressing students, teachers, and school districts. 

But all this dissension about new student assessments has little to do with student well-being. Instead, this uproar is about whether New Jersey should backtrack on a bipartisan teacher tenure reform bill, TEACHNJ, which ties teacher evaluations to student outcomes. In other words, this is about job security, not student security.

Read the rest here.

FYI, here's Wikipedia's definition of a push poll: "A push poll is an interactive marketing technique, most commonly employed during political campaigning, in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of voters under the guise of conducting a poll."