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House Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
House of Representatives
Session of 2023 - 2024
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | September 21, 2023 12:30 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Representative Eric R. Nelson and Rep. Martina A. White |
| To: | All House members |
| Subject: | Replace PSSA's with Benchmark Testing |
| Please join us in eliminating Pennsylvania’s burdensome PSSA testing requirement. Our legislation will replace this time-consuming, expensive process that produces delayed information with benchmark testing technology. Our schools currently use benchmark testing as an existing assessment tool to provide real-time educational performance data for students; this is used by educators and administrators to track individual student, and classroom performance against national standards. This concept comes from grass-root conversations with school districts across Pennsylvania. We have learned that nationally recognized benchmark testing has competitive assessments, provides real-time performance data to parents and teachers which becomes a useful tool in tracking individual education plans and academic performance for larger student groups. There is bipartisan acknowledgement that our current PSSA testing process is outdated, takes away two or three weeks of instructional time from our students, and cost taxpayers $48 million to administer this year alone. Additionally, the testing results are returned months after the assessments are taken so they provide limited academic value. It is time Pennsylvania advances from a backward-looking academic snapshot to an improved process which compares real-time academic growth of our students against a national scale. Our legislation would enable a minimum of three benchmark assessments during a child’s school year and the larger, aggregate data of school and district results would also be publicly available. The recent Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court decision is going to result in considerable change in our state’s educational landscape. Join us in helping to enable benchmark testing, comparison against national performance and real-time feedback become our improved future assessment tool for districts. |
Memo Updated: September 21, 2023 12:31 PM