Over the 24-25 school year, OUSD administrators have increasingly mandated the use of district curriculum and teachers’ administration of multiple interim and reading assessments. Many schools have assigned a TSA to manage i-Ready implementation, a position which could otherwise be used to serve students. In a memo dated May 1, 2024, High School Network central office directors outlined not only the annual program for Illustrative Mathematics interim
assessments, i-Ready, and Fishtank, but also plans for forthcoming assessments in science and history.

The increase in testing and the mandate to “teach to the test” is a familiar and ominous trend for public education policy, and one that threatens to degrade the quality of our classroom education, fire teachers, and close more public schools rather than support them. Most urgently, this testing regime is impacting the time that could be spent on furthering students’ education. Testing consumes considerable class time that could be used for learning, and some of these tests require teacher scoring, adding more unpaid labor to our list of duties. Furthermore, by pushing teachers to use only district-aligned curriculum and to “teach to the test”, it steps on our ability to do our basic job: to develop engaging curriculum that is relevant to our students and to teach.