Members of New York State United Teachers rally on March 2nd, in Albany. Photograph by Mike Groll / AP

If it’s March, it must be test-prep season: next month, New York students in grades three through eight will take the state’s standardized English Language Arts and Mathematics tests: three days of exams devoted to both subjects, lasting for upward of seventy minutes a day. These are often referred to as high-stakes tests because of the impact that the results can have on student promotion, teacher evaluation, and school funding—and the stakes of the tests in New York this year may be pushed higher still. In his State of the State address, delivered at the end of January, Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged to make education reform a centerpiece of his agenda. “Everyone will tell you, nationwide, the key to education reform is a teacher evaluation system,” the governor said. He noted that while only thirty-eight per cent of New York State high-school students are deemed to be “college ready,” according to their scores on standardized tests, 98.7 per cent of teachers in New York’s schools are rated “effective.” “How can that be?” Cuomo asked. “Who are we kidding, my friends? The problem is clear and the solution is clear. We need real, accurate, fair teacher evaluations.”

That teachers should be evaluated is an assertion with which no reasonable person involved with education—from a policy-maker to a parent—is likely to disagree. But how teachers might best be evaluated remains a contested science. In New York City, a system that incorporates a range of metrics, called Advance, was adopted in 2013. Students' results in state tests account for twenty per cent of a teacher’s rating, but the teacher’s curriculum materials are also evaluated, as is his or her classroom practice, which is observed on multiple visits throughout the year by the school principal or another observer.

In his remarks, Cuomo dismissed the methods of evaluation currently in place as “baloney,” and stated his intention to institute a new set of measures. If his proposals are approved along with the rest of the state budget ahead of the annual April 1st deadline, fifty per cent of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on his or her students’ scores on the annual state tests, with the remaining fifty per cent heavily weighted to include the assessment of an outside observer after a one-time visit. The judgment of the school principal will count for just fifteen per cent of a teacher’s effectiveness rating. Any teacher deemed ineffective for two consecutive years may be fired.

Cuomo’s faith in the results of state tests as the best measure of the abilities of both students and teachers is not universally shared. Among those who have dissented is New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. (Assembly Democrats are also reportedly opposed.) In testimony to a joint legislative budget committee in Albany, de Blasio warned that “excessive reliance on high-stakes testing is troubling. Standardized tests should not be the largest part of a full evaluation of a student or a teacher.” The mayor pointed out that test scores might be tipped downward by only a very small variation in student performance from year to year. With their livelihoods potentially in jeopardy over such minor variation, teachers will be obliged to teach to the test, he said, rather than “teaching for learning.” Teachers themselves are warning that, under such conditions, they will be obliged to narrow their curricula, forgoing collaborative science projects for worksheet drills. Other observers have pointed out that teachers who feel insecure about their ratings may focus on improving the test chances of their most able students at the expense of nurturing the capacities of the least able members of their classroom. Meanwhile, a principal who assigns struggling students to the very best teachers—the teacher those students need the most—risks a drop in the teacher’s scores, which could mean she or he will be lost to the school.

Carmen Fariña, New York City schools chancellor, has repeatedly questioned the usefulness of state-test results in evaluating student, teacher, or school performance. Last fall, Fariña announced that the “letter grade” system of ranking schools which had been introduced in the Bloomberg era—and was based solely on a school’s test-score performance—would be replaced by a different system that would take into account not only test scores but also the observations of outside reviewers and the results of parental-satisfaction surveys, among other measures.

Fariña also wrote a letter to New York City principals last testing season, lamenting stories she’d heard of trips to the Metropolitan Museum or the Bronx Zoo being foregone for the sake of more practice at multiple-choice bubbling. In her letter, Fariña urged principals to resist the temptation to seek better test scores through excessive test prep: “As educators, most of us know that the best preparation for the test is a rich, thoughtful, engaging curriculum that awakens curiosity in students, inspires them to ask questions, helps them explore complex problems, and encourages them to imagine possibilities,” she wrote. Even Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, whose department ties school funding to test results, has warned that “too much testing can rob school buildings of joy, and cause unnecessary stress,” noting that testing should only be one measure of progress. “In too many places, testing itself has become a distraction from the work it is meant to support,” Duncan wrote last fall.

That readying students to take the kind of tests the state requires is not the same thing as teaching them—that it can, indeed, be the opposite of real learning, interfering with the fruitful conduct of the classroom and diverting attention and resources away from study—is an irony that is, at this point, fully embedded in the discourse around education. It has also become, increasingly, a motivation for parents, teachers, and principals to take direct action by opting out of state tests altogether. Last year, forty-nine thousand students opted out of the New York State E.L.A. test; sixty-seven thousand opted not to take the math exam. (At the school my son attends, PS 146, in Brooklyn, seventy per cent of students in testing grades opted out.) But 1.1 million students did take the test.

This year, parents and educators are discussing the implications for students, teachers, and institutions should still greater numbers decline to participate in state tests—particularly given Cuomo’s proposals, against which protests and rallies are taking place this week in New York City and in Albany. At a forum at PS 261 in Brooklyn last week, Carol Burris, a high-school principal on Long Island who has spoken and written frequently about testing, noted that student proficiency, as measured by the state E.L.A. tests, was seventy per cent in 2009. By 2013, it had dropped to thirty-one per cent—the shift not caused by a catastrophic decline in the quality of instruction but, rather, owing to the different demands of new tests introduced in 2013, intended to be more in line with the newly adopted Common Core standards. Such a drastic reversal indicates at least as much about the tests—the efficacy of which have been widely challenged—as it does about the abilities of teachers or students. “Because we want to pretend to be objective doesn’t make it so,” Burris said.

In a tacit acknowledgement of the opt-out movement’s momentum, the New York City Department of Education last week updated its parental guidelines concerning state testing in grades three through eight. The guide notes that schools are required to participate in state testing in order to qualify for federal funds, and that there is no official provision for parents to opt out. But, it says, should parents express a desire for their children not to participate in state testing, “the principal should respect the parents’ decision and let them know that the school will work to the best of their ability to provide the child with an alternate educational activity” during testing time.

The Department of Education guide also notes that, because of changes made to the law last spring, New York City public schools may no longer use these state-test scores as the sole, primary, or principal factor in admissions policies, something some competitive middle and high schools had previously done. (There will continue to be a separate specialized high-school admissions test for eight schools; others have been instructed to develop policies for applications from students who do not have seventh-grade state-test scores.) In the light of such widespread skepticism about over-reliance on test results—and such widespread consensus about the detrimental effects engendered by teaching to the test—the governor’s doubling down on state test results to assess teachers’ effectiveness seems a questionable calculation. It looks likely, though, that, should Cuomo’s proposal come into effect, test-prep season will start a lot earlier next year, for everyone.