The following petition comes to me from Debbie Cohen (shmebs@nettaxi.com), a student at Western. She tells me she has "281 signatures with me at this very moment and probably around 100 or more running around with my friends" and that testing begins on Tuesday (Debbie Cohen, electronic mail, May 7-8, 2000).

Attend the Saturday, May 13th Democratic Breakfast at 9:30 a.m. in the Terrace Room at the Ice Park on the Downtown Mall to hear Steve Koleszar (Albemarle County School Board) and Richard Merriwether (Charlottesville School Board), who will speak about SOL's and other educational issues.

And send your comments about SOL's to george@loper.org, where the most representative will be posted with full attribution.

We, the undersigned, object to Virginia's Standards of Learning tests (SOLs) and the way they have been implemented into the school system.

First, many of the past tests were found to be ineffective at assessing student's abilities. There have been questions with no correct multiple choice selection and those with more than one correct answer but only one correct multiple choice selection. The SOLs have also been found to be biased against students with socio-economic hardships, disabilities, and limited English proficiency. Therefore, we submit that these tests have been unfair, and we can only assume that the future tests will follow the same pattern.

Furthermore, throughout this year, teachers have been forced to "teach to the tests" in order to raise SOL test scores as much as possible. For example, rather than helping students develop critical thinking skills, teachers have been skipping over important subject matter, teaching only facts expected to be covered on the SOLs, and administering multiple choice tests when ones with other formats would have been more appropriate and fair. For this reason, we submit that the SOLs do not allow for students to learn as much or as well as they could, through no fault of the teachers.

Not all schools and all students across Virginia are the same and we do not manifest our abilities and intelligence in the same ways. Therefore we should not be accountable to the exact same tests. Student's achievements and school quality should not be based on any one factor, especially multiple choice standardized tests, which have already been observed as biased and hurtful. Scores on these tests have become far too important, and they should not outweigh real skills and achievement. There is no research that concludes that high-stakes testing such as the SOLs improves education overall or benefits students in the least. In fact, believing so contradicts much of what is known about how students learn.

Finally, the SOLs have been called a "work-in-progress," but they are already affecting Virginia's education system and its students in a very negative way. Over time, it might result in even more separation within schools, between those students with good past test scores and those with poorer past test scores. Also, stressing the SOLs could result in an unhealthy learning environment, especially with very young children feeling the pressure of having to pass high-stakes tests. Furthermore, the results of these tests will affect school accreditation and reduce funding in areas that need it most. Therefore, we propose that Virginia's students not be obligated to take these tests until more research has been conducted and a fair alternative is substituted.

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