Admittedly, sorting out wishful thinking, make believe, and truth in the pile of facts and factoids presented to us is a daunting task. We have too much information and not enough time to evaluate that information. Politicians and bureaucrats may focus on the many, many schools that have become attics where we cram children who have the misfortune to live in the wrong zip code. The failures in those zip codes glare at us from the pages of mandatory state reports on school performance. The desire to fix those failures naturally results in desperate measures.
Nevertheless, our nation’s political and academic leaders seem to be missing a few critical pieces of the puzzle: In particular, testing is a two-edged sword, and I have begun to fear we are slaying more students than dragons. Let’s look at the composite PARCC test* scores for Illinois for 2014.
Yellow and orange represent the students who did not make targets. The PARCC people nicely informed all those students that they had failed, too. It appears more Asian students passed than failed. Of all the subgroups tested, Asians are the ONLY group who passed overall — but many fails obviously exist in this category as well.
We clobbered these kids, especially all the kids in the orange bars. That’s important. Forgive the sarcasm but our educational leaders sure made a lot of kids feel like they were doing well in school. Those leaders sure made a lot of kids believe they were college-material.
If America’s government and school leaders can’t see the likely effect of this test, I can see it clearly. The first time I asked a student why a quiz had gone wrong and got the answer, “I’m just dumb, Ms. Q,” I was horrified. Now, I understand too well where my students are coming from. All they have to do in many cases will be to look at their PARCC results to confirm this congealing self-image.
As I said in a previous post, I spent the whole of my last year working on resiliency as I gave nonstop, mandatory, Common-Core based tests and quizzes.
Here’s the other critical piece our leaders miss:
We spend an enormous amount of time getting these kids ready for the test that will hammer them like Jack Torrance with his roque mallet in “The Shining.” Thwack, thwack, some bloodied students keep trying to climb the stairs to safety. Other just lay down to wait for the blows. Some schools spend the whole year getting ready for that test, over and over again. .
AND EVERY TIME WE MEASURE STUDENT PROGRESS, WE SACRIFICE INSTRUCTION.
*An annual state test used by a number of states based on the Common Core. If the PARCC Consortium had let me or any number of teachers take that test before they rolled it out nationally, I could have predicted these test results. Some states are quickly backing away from the Core and/or the PARCC test. My guess is others do not want to admit how badly they screwed up this decision that impacted all the students in their state.