The amount of time administration has spent getting ready for all these tests involves a formidable opportunity cost. In a less dragon-infested universe, these administrators might be able to organize community-outreach and student-spirit activities. They might be able to evaluate resource needs and plan for the future.

Still, in these times, keeping administration frantically busy may serve the greater good. Perhaps we are better off if administrators don’t have time to create more spreadsheets to fill with more data. At the rate we are going, we will be recording the Common Core standards associated with every test question on every required quiz, rather like the expectations for the SLO assessment from a few posts back, with individual line items for every student. Then we will all be expected to create multipage plans showing how we intend to address failed individual test questions for each student.

Eduhonesty: We are generating enormous quantities of information with all the required reports and spreadsheets teachers are now making to provide data for administrative decision-making. Does anyone have time to read and assess all this information? Does anyone ever step back and ask what information may be duplicative? What information may not be worth the time required to gather, compile and file?

We are doing two benchmark tests three times a year, not including the Common Core-based, national PARCC test which comes in two multi-day sessions. Could we skip AIMSWEB and just do MAP? Or could we do AIMSWEB in 6th and MAP in 7th and 8th? Do we need three sessions? Could we get by with two? How about MAP in late September and late March?

Eduhonesty: I’m a great believer that if at first you don’t succeed, you should try, try and try again — but when something nearing one-twelfth of a school year is sacrificed to testing, we just might be trying too hard. Hell, the people scheduling these tests seem to have fallen down the rabbit hole. The watching world must think we’ve gone barmy. I know I do.

We need some balance out here in the teaching trenches. Help! The more time we spend teaching our students, the more we will increase the odds that some of those students may actually learn the missing math and English which has been pulling down their test scores.

As I passed by the Principal’s office, I saw the many plastic boxes that will contain all of our PARCC materials. The Assistant Principal was running around on Friday attempting to manage MAP make-ups. Other coaches are finishing up AIMSWEB, although I am waiting for them to put their data in. I entered my data in this latest, standardized-test spreadsheet. I keep fearing that somehow I will have to put in the fluency data for which coaches, paraprofessionals and strangers have been pulling students out of class.

I will say we have managed this last attack of the test dragon with more efficiency. The administration obviously did a great deal of brainstorming and planning to pull this latest confluence of three standardized tests into a manageable chunk of time. Total whole-class time loss from testing itself was greatly reduced when AIMSWEB fluency was passed to outsiders, since fluency must be individually administered. Fluency cost me nearly a full day during the last testing round. We saved that day this time, although individual students all missed differing chunks of differing classes. MAP only took two days of student time with a bit of actual instruction thrown into off times. I will estimate total student time loss to MAP and AIMSWEB at about three days. The actual numbers are less than that but, as I have noted before, the stress of MAP testing tends to leave students pretty wrecked during those parts of the MAP day when they are not testing. I am counting each MAP day as a full day lost. AIMSWEB has less effect since this test is given in small time chunks and we were giving this test later in the day. Total time might be calculated for the two tests to be more like two and one-half days, except for the impact of make-ups. On Friday, five of my students were taken from class for make-ups. Other make-ups for AIMSWEB tests have been worked into class periods. These make-ups force rearrangement of instruction toward review and away from new material. When five students are pulled from a class, that class time might as well be considered lost.

The above tallies represent student time lost. My time loss has to include evenings of grading AIMSWEB and SLOs (except I didn’t — see the earlier post). Administration must also have been losing a great deal of time. They have to plan all this testing and, due to our internet connectivity issues, that planning is complex. If we had the computers and bandwidth, we could do PARCC in only a couple of days, but we are forced to test grade by grade and then work out the make-ups for the different grades. PARCC will only take a couple of my days next week, but administration will be dealing with PARCC for more than a week, as each grade takes its two days and then any required make-up time.

Eduhonesty: Total time loss by my students from this third group of AIMSWEB, MAP and PARCC testing will be about 5 days — or 1/36th of the school year — from only one of the three testing periods of this year. Apologists might try to present lower numbers, taking only the time of actual test sessions, but a morning of state standardized testing guarantees an afternoon of squirreliness so I am counting the mega-tests of MAP and PARCC as full days lost.

My numbers don’t include required tests written by an outside consulting firm that I am required to give — whether those tests are pedagogically appropriate or not. I have one of those tests scheduled for next week too. My students are testing almost all of next week. I can only assume the officials demanding all these tests have been dipping into the squirrel stash a bit too often.

Ummm… aren’t we supposed to teach them sometimes, too?

As noted in an earlier post, my school has blocked all streaming video because of testing concerns. I have been told that at somewhere around 80 people taking computerized tests, our limited bandwidth starts throwing people out of the system. We can’t allow those performance issues when taking standardized tests, so the district tech people have been trying to conserve bandwidth at all costs. If you’re not testing, you’re not on the internet. I’ve stumbled on one particularly boring, preapproved math exception, but overall we are in book, pencil and paper mode.

When we talk about costs of testing, I believe we lose the little details at the edges. Can I teach without streaming video? Of course I can. Can my students operate without using the internet? In the very recent past, all students did. But would my students benefit from access to the internet, especially access to their math reinforcement program and other online tutorials? Without doubt. Between PARCC and MAP tests being administered across the grades, though, we have shut down the net. We have been down for one and one-half weeks. Unfortunately, while MAP wrapped up today, PARCC starts next week. Given that we are forced to give this test grade by grade, due to internet issues, and then follow with make-up tests in a district with relatively high absenteeism, my students won’t have internet access for at least two more weeks probably — if then. That’s more than one-twelfth of the school year. The total would be significantly greater than one-twelfth if technology had figured out the advantages of blocking streaming sites sooner.

Eduhonesty: We are in our third major block of testing. If they block during all testing next year, will we shut down video for one-fourth of the school year? The costs here are mostly details at the edges of instruction, but those details enhance instruction. My PowerPoint on gravity and inertia had a neat link to a site with crash dummies, useful for reinforcing my side trip into why we should buckle our seatbelts. (“YOU are still going 60 MPH!”) But we can’t see the crash dummies. Other links showed planets circling the sun. But we can’t watch the planets circle. My links are useless.

This loss from the barrage of testing is unlikely to hit any researcher’s radar. In the larger scheme of things, my losses will be considered small. We are talking about diminishing instruction in favor of testing, though, and I want to blog this loss. While I am blogging ancillary damage, I’ll also note that 5 students were pulled out of my classes today for MAP make-ups, actually seven due to a scheduling snafu, and that those students missed quiz reviews and labs. I keep saying I’ll catch up all these kids later, but I don’t know when or how later will come. In math, I have to give a quiz on Monday — I am already a day behind schedule — and I have a medical test that will suck up Tuesday when they will be doing review for a math unit test on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday will be PARCC testing. Science classes are slogging along, not much more than one day behind. Those classes will be impacted by PARCC as well.

Sigh.

More precisely, I miss streaming video. I am allowed to find still shots across cyberspace to help me in my teaching efforts. What I can’t find — and what my students and I cannot access — is anything that moves across the screen. Streaming video has been shut off for over a week with more than a week to go. Because MAP and PARCC tests are computer-based exams, we have been struggling with bandwidth throughout the year. Apparently, after we put more than 80 or so people on, the system starts throwing people off, an obviously unacceptable problem during high-stakes testing. To conserve bandwidth, we have blocked streaming video. We have been MAP testing since the beginning of last week and are now in make-ups for the MAP test, but videos will not be restored soon. PARCC’s second session starts next week.

Eduhonesty: This led to at least one funny moment in my classroom. We were making paper pots for an Earth Day lab that ended with our planting seeds. The instructional video could not be played. Helpful teachers found paper instructions which were printed and distributed to various classrooms but, frankly, I could not make out the instructions. I bogged down at the point where I doubled up the brim of the pirate hat. After wasting about 10 class minutes folding and unfolding paper, I cut the class loose to invent their own pots. Well, the idea was no tape and staples because we want the newspaper to dissolve completely in the soil. After a few minutes watching students with packaging tape making nonbiodegradable cones, I went and borrowed a couple of special education students who knew how to make the pots. The special ed teacher had pots down cold. Her students taught my students.

We all have our talents. I hit the wall on paper pots. Fortunately, we had a few twelve-year-old experts across the hall.

One of my students missed school on Monday and Tuesday. I thought his explanation worth blogging. The disciplinary conundrum illustrated by this story is taking place in schools all over America.

My student was supposed to attend Saturday school. Serious or repeated rule infractions result in Saturday school. The Dean told him he would receive a suspension if he did not make it to Saturday school. Nevertheless, my student did not go.

On Monday, he decided he must be suspended so he did not go to school. First, he went skateboarding where he worked on perfecting two new tricks. Then he went home and played “Gears of War” for a few hours. After that, he visited his cousin and played Dodgeball in some brush somewhere. He showed me the scratches from running through the bushes. Finally, he ambled home. The next day, my student was planning to go to school, but his older brother decided to skip and asked him to stay home too. My student was still thinking of going to school, but then his brother promised they could play “Assassin’s Creed” all day, an offer that was too good to refuse.

My first thought was, “I want to be suspended!” Probably almost every kid in my class wanted to be suspended after hearing that story.

“Weren’t your parents mad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “They were.” Then he shrugged.

Both parents work during the day. That’s true in a great many households nowadays. In those households, suspensions often become mini-vacations. I supposed I ought to tell this story to the Dean, but what is she going to do? Suspend him? That’ll sure work. At this rate, he might die of happiness.

Eduhonesty: This will require a Dean discussion and a call home. These are motivated parents. Dad made it to conferences and I know he has been trying to keep his boys on track. I’ll try to help. Still, disciplinary issues in homes where both parents work can be extremely tough to manage.

I have hammered the theme of opportunity costs incurred from excess testing in earlier posts. The SLO provides a great example. SLO (Student Learning Objective) is another government-mandated test, a content-specific exam aligned to curricular standards.

As part of the SLO process, I was obliged to give all my classes tests which covered the material we planned to teach this semester. Most of the material on the SLO test had not yet been taught. I reassured students repeatedly that their first SLO tests would not be part of their grades. I recommended they try to remember questions when possible, since the tests would be repeated as major exams at a later date. I reiterated that I was not going to hold them responsible for not knowing vocabulary and concepts they had never seen before. Readers need to be clear that students are not expected to know the material on the first SLO test. We are handing kids tests filled with questions on content they have never seen.

The purpose of the SLO is to evaluate teachers, not students. The rationale seems to be that the better students do on the second go-round of the test, the better the teacher must be. I’d like to observe that this will only be true for age and learning-appropriate tests. If I test a sixth-grader on high school physics, both the first and last test can be expected to be epic fails, even in the hands of the best teachers. Under Common Core, the bar has been raised to levels that can defeat many diligent students, but that’s another post. I want to stick with the SLO.

The first part of the SLO was not particularly time-consuming, one day lost to exams that would not be included in grades. Since all classes will give SLOs, a whole day of instruction is actually lost with that first test. Teachers must also grade their SLOs, losing class preparation time and the opportunity to grade “real” papers.

After the second administration of the SLO test, the time suck really begins. Teachers are expected to assess learning progress between test one and test two. This progress will be factored into their final evaluations. I confess I have not done my SLO. I am hoping administrative poobahs will ignore my breach of state requirements — SLOs came out of a state law — since I am retiring. If not, I have all the tests. I have always kept my tests in case questions arose later. This year, I have been obliged to save so many tests that I think the contents of my drawers would keep that library in “The Day after Tomorrow” warm for the afternoon or maybe even the whole day.

A picture will help make the time loss in this process easier to understand:

This is a sample of the template used by one department. The CCSS are Common Core State Standards. Each question has to be recorded according to what state standard(s) apply. Success on each question has to be assessed. My sample has five students but some classes will have around 30 students. Standards and scores must be assessed. Scores must be color coded. If you are special education or bilingual, you can expect to see red all over your spreadsheet. That sheet will be dripping the blood of your falling evaluation.

This is the work I have not done, the work I hope never to do. This spreadsheet represents at least a full day of my time and probably then some. I am not a fast grader, as I have previously noted, and then I would be expected to catalog all this work after I am done. Teachers are going to have to conference with a coach when they are done. The coach means well and I cannot fault the district for helping teachers learn to navigate the SLOs. But that’s more time lost. Avoiding the SLO alone provides me with adequate reason to consider retiring. As I sit here, I am imagining what teachers must feel like as they look at the red sprawling across their spreadsheets, knowing that red will affect their evaluation, possibly even lead to their failure to be recalled for the next year.

Doing this spreadsheet seems a bit like being forced to carry your own cross.

Eduhonesty: Of course, some results will be fine. I narrowly avoided a SLO last year that would have been heavily in my favor, I believe. As part of my teaching assignment for a half-year when I was at the high school, I was given a Consumer Math class that included almost all juniors and seniors who were college-bound. For SLOs, this was a dream combination. Students knew very little of the course content, since this was an elective that was not part of the core curriculum, and they were motivated to get good grades for college purposes. When I transferred to the middle school, I happily abandoned that SLO but maybe I ought to have done all the work since I knew that final showed tremendous improvement over the semester since the first SLO. I’ll confess I was just glad to avoid making my spreadsheet. I am sick of extra work.

That Consumer Math class highlights one major problem with the SLOs, though. Luck of the class figures hugely in SLO results. Special education teachers can be at a tremendous disadvantage, especially in a district that is forcing them to give the same regular instruction and tests as “regular” teachers. AP or gifted teachers, on the other hand, are likely to go into the SLOs with a winning hand, especially if they are teaching a subject like Consumer Math, one with relatively easy content that students have not encountered previously.

Another problem with SLOs can be seen in my snippet of a spreadsheet above. How many lessons could be planned in the time that one SLO spreadsheet demands, especially if 29 students must be individually recorded on separate lines with all the accompanying common core standard columns? How much tutoring could be done? Does the SLO make the teacher evaluation process more efficient in any way whatsoever? The state is already using the 4 domains, 22 components, and 76 elements of the Danielson Rubric to evaluate teachers, a cumbersome instrument that the Danielson group has already attempted to condense into “clusters.” My last evaluation was 22 pages long without any SLO data added.

The opportunity cost resulting from the increased evaluation demands and SLOs strikes me as nothing short of absurd. Is there any evidence that this new system works better than the two or three page evaluations from the past?

What is MAP testing? MAP, or the “Measure of Academic Progress,” is a computerized, adaptive test. As students get answers right or wrong, the test moves up and down the learning curve. When the student answers correctly, questions become more difficult. When the student makes a mistake, the questions become easier. Because the computer adjusts the questions as the test progresses, each student will receive a test tailored to that student’s responses. MAP uses the RIT scale (Rasch unIT) to chart a child’s academic growth from year to year, and provides estimations of RIT values for different grade levels.

We are MAP testing three times this year, testing sessions that assess language arts and mathematics. The tests are not specifically timed, but run around an hour in length. If students do not finish in a given session, the test can be paused, allowing students to finish later. In general, students throughout the country will repeat the tests three times in a given school year. MAP is a benchmark test, intended to assess student growth so that teachers can adapt learning as needed.

I like the MAP test more than any of the other standardized tests that I am forced to give. I get nearly immediate feedback from this test with useful breakdowns that theoretically would allow me to target instruction. My ability to take advantage of this information has been hindered this year by the communal lesson plan that I am required to follow, the tests that I must give at certain times and am not allowed to adapt, (They plan adaptations next year since the identical tests for everyone worked about as well as forcing everyone to wear size seven shoes.) and the materials that I am expected to use because everyone else is using those materials. Still, MAP represents a real testing win for me because I learn where my students are deficient. I can at least try to catch them up during tutoring or in small groups.

(Once again, in defense of the district, those students at the top of MAP distribution have benefited significantly in many cases from our freight train of a communal lesson plan. The students at the bottom have not fared as well, though, and have had a scary, rough year.)

A Student Learning Objective (SLO) is another test, a content-specific exam aligned to curricular standards. As part of the SLO process, teachers give their classes tests which cover material they intend to teach over a quarter or semester. Most of the material on the SLO test has not yet been taught. Later, often at term’s end, a second administration of the identical SLO test occurs. The improvement from test to test will be factored into teachers’ final evaluations. SLOs came from a well-intentioned, Illinois law. Unfortunately, as Thomas Edison once observed, “A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.” The SLO test will be my next post.

What is PARCC? PARCC stands for The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. This test has replaced previous standardized tests in 13 states. As of 2010, 23 states and the District of Columbia were part of the PARCC consortium, but states have been backing out since that time. However, Illinois remains in the consortium and the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) is gone, replaced by PARCC. While paper versions of the PARCC test exist, these new tests are essentially computerized. PARCC tests are aligned to the new Common Core standards, which stress reading comprehension and critical thinking. The test does not yet have a “passing” score, keeping the pressure off school districts this year. After enough student results have been analyzed, PARCC intends to develop a grading scale. Many districts and parents have been attempting to opt out of the PARCC test due to concerns about the appropriateness of various common core standards. Chicago tried to pull out, but changed its position because of the large number of government $$$ the city stood to lose if the test was not administered.

AIMSWEB is another benchmark test, like MAP, although it only tests basic skills, rather than specific content areas. AIMSWEB checks for reading and language skills, math computation, concepts and applications. It requires little student time to administer this test, but vastly more teacher time than MAP. MAP provides me with results. I have to grade AIMSWEB and, frankly, this week it seems like AIMSWEB grading has become the albatross hanging around my neck. When I quit this post, I expect to spend the rest of the evening grading AIMSWEB papers. Plusses for AIMSWEB include the limited loss of student time and the paper and pencil administration. AIMSWEB provides fast, useful feedback once you get through all the cursed grading. I’m sure it makes lots of money for Pearson, too.

Eduhonesty: Let’s note that the test industry makes oceans of dollars for a number of participants. That may be one reason why testing has taken off recently. As the popular catchphrase goes, follow the money. An insane number of dollars must be in play.

(This post has too many acronyms. I’ll work on that shortly — no time! — but confused readers might go back to posts around January 14 or so of this year. That was the last round of mega-testing. Those posts will help. Still, I need to stop assuming everybody understands this alphabet soup. I promise — definitions tonight.)

Time dedicated to MAP on April 15th ran 160 minutes or 2 hours and 40 minutes. I clocked and blogged the time for the 16th because I had been administering the test, but neglected the 15th because another teacher had proctored that test. However, my students took the test both days, so they spent 5 hours and 20 minutes in direct MAP testing over those two days. They were also pulled out from my colleagues class for AIMSWEB fluency.

Testing at that level of intensity tends to fry most students, rendering them semi-useless for the rest of the day. So while testing on the 15th did not take place in my classroom, it certainly affected my classroom. They were tired and whiny, except for the few who were goofy. Especially during the last period of the day, students had trouble maintaining their focus. Math? Look it’s a fire truck! He’s going fast. Yeah, there was a car chase in my neighborhood last week. Like Fast and Furious. Please, let’s get back on task. Yeah, Ms. Q, do you know what they call those white cars? You know, the ones with the… Wow, that’s crazy. Yeah, he must’ve been going 70 MPH.

I kept calling straying kittens back into the pack. We worked on medians and relatively simple mathematical concepts. Science had been set up to allow for background music while taking notes, at least some of the time. I did my best to go forward while providing stress relief as I tried to neutralize the effect of fire trucks.

The woman pulling out students for AIMSWEB today came to get the last two from my homeroom, but one was suspended and the other absent. This latest round of testing is almost over. We are getting more efficient. Still, I have been grading AIMSWEB tonight. I have spent two and one-half hours grading AIMSWEB and I haven’t managed to grade actual tests that kids took in science. I’m caught up on their math quizzes except for the make-ups. Maybe I can do those early tomorrow. The kids want to see their tests, I’m sure, but I have to have the AIMSWEB data in the spreadsheet by the end of the week. I haven’t managed to do any planning for class tomorrow either. When I get up and look at the communal lesson plans early tomorrow, I hope they’re simple. They usually are. Anything that requires a great deal of set-up has generally been avoided this year. We are all grading AIMSWEB this week and some other teachers have more than twice as many students as I do.

Eduhonesty: I’ll add a few more notes. The Department Chair for yesterday’s meeting reminded us to be on time, noting that state observers were due in soon and will expect to see us all in our meetings on time. She pointed us to an email listing another testing responsibility; I have to go over the MAP results with my kids. I consider this last demand reasonable since giving the kids more information about the tests tests tests helps them to take those tests more seriously. They will try harder on MAP if they know what they are doing and why. Since this test is going into their permanent record, any strategy to make them take the test seriously represents a win. Still, that’s at least one more period lost. Our last MAP testing sucked up two days for six days total, or over 3% of the school year, not including all the MAP preparation and MAP dissection after the fact. Throw those aspects in and we will be above 4% but under 5%, I’d estimate. It’s difficult to tease out the exact number since some MAP prep activities are genuinely pedagogically usefully useful and I will not throw them into my count. Administrators might counter that actual, total test time runs less than that, but test time bleeds over into all the activities for the day.

That 3-4% only applies to MAP. We still don’t have AIMSWEB and PARCC in the picture, the other two standardized tests for the year. We don’t have all the required test-prep materials test designed to help improve test scores that turn up in my mailbox throughout the week, sucking up my tutoring time. I’ll try to get the numbers down for AIMSWEB, PARCC (one session left to go) and the SLO in the near future.

P.S. Fortunately, the lesson plans for today are exquisitely simple, using pages from the textbook. Before I forget, we also postponed a math quiz in acknowledgement of testing time requirements, so my grading is lighter than usual.

A fellow math teacher made a great observation last week. He asked why we can’t group classes by mathematical mastery levels since that would be “tracking,” a scorned idea of the past, while we are supposed to break our classes into small groups so that we can work most effectively with groups at different mastery levels. “Why can’t we do on a macro level what we are supposed to do on a micro level?” He asked.

Eduhonesty: Ummm… I don’t know the answer. Because we might have to employ more teachers to make sure that all groups received the best possible instruction? Because tracking might discriminate in favor of students who can actually do their math? Because we all have to be in fashion — even if that educational fashion currently has a lot in common with the 6-inch stiletto heels of the shoe world?

Maybe we just like to make everyone’s lives harder.

I believe small groups are in vogue now because, in many classes, teachers cannot choose to teach any other way. If one class varies in mathematical mastery by six or more years, then whole group instruction always confuses some while boring others. One exception to this last statement: If no one in the class knows the content, then whole group instruction is wholly appropriate. But you can surely get in trouble for not breaking into useless, time-sucking groups anyway!