By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

DETROIT – Members of the American Federation of Teachers will descend upon Detroit late next week for the union’s annual convention.

The union is planning to use the gathering to “launch an all-out drive against school systems’ overdependence on high-stakes testing as a measure of student progress,” reports PeoplesWorld.org.

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“ … (W)e are sacrificing time that could be spent on learning and promoting reading to focus on tests that too often are unreliable indicators of student performance, of poor quality, and full of errors,” AFT member Don Carlisto recently said.

Using Detroit as the backdrop for the kickoff of AFT’s anti-testing campaign is a bold choice. Detroit Public Schools are the worst in the nation, and nobody can say with a straight face that standardized tests are to blame. That distinction belongs largely to the teacher unions that protect lazy, incompetent, indifferent, and sometimes dangerous educators.

Just ask one of the nearly 50 high school seniors who staged a public protest outside Detroit Public Schools’ Frederick Douglass Academy last April. The students were upset that they’d been given such a lousy education, and knew it would haunt them after they left school.

The protesting students said it was commonplace for large numbers of teachers to be absent at the same time, causing a teacher shortage. School administrators would then herd students into the school gym for a glorified babysitting session.

And when class was actually in session, students said they seldom received homework.

Tevin Hill told reporters that when he took a college math placement exam, he “literally couldn’t answer a question on there.”

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Hill’s conclusion? “We’ve been wronged and disrespected and lied to and cheated.”

But AFT leaders don’t want to talk about how union policies have helped create and preserve the chaotic conditions of Detroit Public Schools and other urban school districts.

Instead, AFT President Randi Weingarten is whining about how “teaching to the test” is preventing educators from delivering “rich” and “meaningful” learning experiences to students.

“The balance is way off – and as a result, test-driven education policies continue to force educators to sacrifice the time they need to help students learn to critically analyze content and, instead, focus on teaching to the test,” Weingarten told PeoplesWorld.org.

Preparing students for state tests and developing critical thinking shouldn’t be an either-or proposition, and Weingarten knows it. She just wants to shift the focus away from the teacher unions’ obvious failings and continue to resist efforts to hold teachers more accountable.

AFT leaders can rail against standardized testing all they want. But all the union’s bloviating and obfuscating will not change the fact that scads of students are graduating from union-controlled schools completely unprepared for life – the biggest “high-stakes test” of them all.