A bill in the legislature would limit the amount of time Nevada’s education system spends on preparing and taking mandatory standardized tests.
Assembly Bill 296 would cap the amount of time student's prepare for and take standardized tests to 2% percent of the duration of their school year.
"We believe the total allotted time we spend with students in school, bell to bell, during the entire course of the school year - anywhere between three to five percent of their time is utilized towards testing, and this equates to anywhere from thirty to fifty hours in a school year, we sit down and perform standardized, high stakes, regulated tests. We want to cap that at 2% , and in doing so we are going to save anywhere from 18 to upwards of 30 hours ourselves on our end, that we can redistribute toward teaching time,” said (D-Las Vegas) Assemblyman Reuben D’Silva.
D'Silva - who is a Las Vegas school teacher - says he often hears complaints from teachers, students, and even parents about the amount of time their schools are spending on standardized testing.
D'silva says this bill is needed more now than ever after the toll the pandemic took on education.
"We are in a post-pandemic world, if you look at all of the university research, all of the academic research out there, we have to do something about the loss of instruction time. One of the actual recommendations that has been made is cutting back on standardized testing, and focusing more on one-on-one teaching time,” explained D’Silva.
AB296 will be heard Thursday during the Assembly Education committee at 1:30 PM.
