- Published: Monday, March 28, 2022 10:49 AM
Illinois Sen. Cristina Pacione-Zayas, a Chicago Democrat, recently spearheaded the Too Young to Test Act, which would prohibit standardized tests for Illinois’ youngest students, except for the case of diagnostic tests including determining eligibility for special education services, bilingual services, dyslexia interventions, observational tools like the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey and the federally mandated English Learner assessments.
“We’ve already taken significant time and resources away from student learning by having students jump right back into testing last spring, in the thick of the pandemic, and the results were what we predicted,” said Pacione-Zayas, a mother of two children...
“Who won here? The testing companies,” Pacione-Zayas said, adding that instead of spending taxpayer dollars on multimillion-dollar contracts with testing companies, the state should use part of the $7 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funding allocated to Illinois schools to improve resources in the classroom for students, and provide professional development for teachers.
“We need a radical transformation in our educational system, because what has been done in the past is not working,” Pacione-Zayas said.
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