I’ll keep hammering on one particular nail in hopes that I am not hammering it into a coffin: Sensitive children may believe that low standardized test scores reflect how capable they are in general. When a child receives a low score on a test that his or her teacher called “important,” that child begins to try to figure out what that score means. By middle school, many kids think they know the answer. I ask them where a test or quiz went wrong and they answer:

“I’m just dumb, Ms. Turner.”

Suddenly, a minor glitch in math learning has become a car wreck in motion in front of me. By the time I start damage control, though, my student may already be bent or even broken. How many years was “Alex” rolling over in the ditch carrying that toxic self-view before I stumbled onto it?

I am not saying students should never receive low scores. If you don’t know a mathematical concept, you should not pass the quiz or test. What I am saying is that high-stakes testing can do long-term damage — a fact teachers know and more educational reformers need to understand.

This test, test, testing? It’s vital to keep in mind that some students will take a poor grade and decide to work harder. Others will give up. I am convinced that “failing” state tests year after year makes some students exit the academic arena, a place where they cannot effectively compete. While we must have unfamiliar material on standardized tests, we are long past due at deemphasizing those tests. Teachers explain that we do not expect students to be able to answer everything on the test and that we only want to learn what they know so that we can figure out exactly what to teach them. BUT ALWAYS COMING IN ON THE BOTTOM OF TEST DISTRIBUTIONS — A POSITION NICELY LAID OUT IN MANY BAR GRAPHS OF RESULTS — TAKES ON A MEANING OF ITS OWN, NO MATTER WHAT THE TEACHER SAYS.

“I’m just dumb, Ms. Turner.”

Kids don’t enter school thinking about themselves this way. They learn this view. High-stakes testing teaches this view — despite all our attempts at deemphasizing test results and creating positive self-images.

P.S. And frankly, if a test cannot tell us what our students need to be taught, we need to scrap the test. A state test that does not come in until after the school year ends is an abominable waste of time.

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.”

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness  (with credit to Bob at lakesideadvisors.com)

Why did I copy this quote? In a spasm of compassion, I saw my students. Where is the kindness in the endless barrage of testing? Where is the empathy that might help data-driven leaders of our time to understand the sorrow they are creating?

Students feel the pressure to get test scores which remain out of reach for them, those students who have not simply given up, trying to protect themselves from yet another emotional blow. They feel the sadness when they fail to come close to hitting expected targets. They feel a gamut of emotions, few of them helpful to building confidence or self-esteem. How does it feel after hours of answering questions if most of the time you don’t know the answers? So many students are far from ready for the Common Core-based questions in many of these tests — special education students, bilingual students and those students who have fallen behind grade level for whatever reason.

Eduhonesty: When I bring this subject up with educational administrators, I am often treated to a speech about how we must get students ready to succeed. Failure is not an option, they say in so many words. Failure will be reflected in your evaluations, too.

But a review of the immense load of big data we are creating reveals that a great many students ARE failing. We document those failures all over school, state and federal websites. The cold numbers do not tell a larger story that needs to be placed front and center for the sake of America’s lower-scoring students. Testing hurts.

Testing has become unkind in the extreme. You must test whether you can read the test or not. You must test if you came here two years ago from Cambodia without speaking English. You must test even if you are innumerate, illiterate and a lifelong special education student. You must test whether you are destined to fail or not.

Here’s the question that desperately needs to be asked: How are these failures — often repeated failures — making our students feel? I have watched such sadness on children’s faces at the end of demanding test days, and hopelessness as well.

We don’t need to throw special education students who are academically delayed into the testing arena to be chewed up. A desire for data should not be allowed to triumph over common sense. One-test-fits-all is not merely stupid; it’s a recipe for lifetime sorrow. We are making kids feel like failures with these tests.

Emotional effects of the data juggernaut are dismissed in the quest for more data, big data that we cannot even effectively analyze due to questions of methodology, validity and reliability, not to mention the sheer lack of time and personnel needed to tease out useful results from that data.

Hello out there? Let’s stop the data train — or at least slow it down. It’s running over many kids, the ones in the far left tail of the bell curves of our tests. I wish bureaucrats and administrators could see some of the beaten, hopeless expressions at the end of a day of school testing. We are teaching sorrow and failure, while we ignore simple human kindness.

Nouns keep turning into verbs lately and let’s science, I say. In particular, I’d like to follow up more vigorously on the studies that suggest laptops and notepads are not improving learning outcomes. Research suggesting that our headlong leap into technological learning may not be fulfilling expectations has been cropping up in the news for awhile. But those studies don’t seem to be impacting school district behavior much. Maybe more science will help.

A report came out in 2015 from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), examining the effect of school technology on international test results. Using the Pisa tests taken in more than 70 countries, the report claimed that frequent use of computers in classrooms does not produce the results many advocates of technology expect, but is frequently associated with lower test results instead. The OECD report claimed that “education systems which have invested heavily in information and communications technology have seen ‘no noticeable improvement’ in Pisa test results for reading, mathematics or science.”

The results of this study ought to slow or stop our headlong rush into 1:1 laptops as a possible method for closing the achievement gap. According to the study, “there is no single country in which the internet is used frequently at school by a majority of students and where students’ performance improved”. More crucially, among “the seven countries with the highest level of internet use in school, … three experienced “significant declines” in reading performance – Australia, New Zealand and Sweden – and three more …”stagnated” – Spain, Norway and Denmark.”

Technology is no panacea. I refer readers to https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34174796, an article by Sean Coughlan from September of 2015, for more details from this report. The articles shows greater and lesser successes from adding technology.

What I would like to see: Let’s find large districts with at least two schools that produce highly similar spring test results. In one school, ban all student electronics except for keyboarding classes in a computer lab. (Keyboarding has too much utility to sacrifice to my experiment.) In the other school, continue with laptops, software, and possible loose phone policies. In the lower-tech school, students will take notes on lined paper and assignments will be done and turned in on paper. I recommend we do this across multiple large districts. The more data in this experiment, the better.

Come spring, we can look at results to see which group did better, assuming either group outperforms its counterpart. I predict the paper and pencil classrooms will do at least as well as their techy counterparts — and for far less money. If I am right, then IT’S TIME TO STOP REFLEXIVELY BUYING NEW TECHNOLOGY AND SOFTWARE. Instead of throwing funds at laptop carts, districts might invest their limited funds in more tutors, activity busses, infrastructure repair and better classroom climate control, for example.

Eduhonesty: I see advantages in laptops and robust software programs. I also see an enormous amount of time wasted on secret games and other activities. As a retired teacher/sub, I am more likely to see those games and YouTube diversions because kids often try to take advantage of the sub. In unfamiliar rooms, I have to close a few Chromebooks and “X” a few games or videos before they stop most days. But kids have been switching activities when the teacher approached since laptops entered the classroom. How much wasted time is too much wasted time?

As to phones, yes, they have calculators. Yes, they have search engines. But given the temptations of social media, phones should be kept in lockers or other secure sites.

We should not have to science this topic. The data available ought to be sufficient to help us make choices by now. But I keep walking into classes filled with laptops that are not working the way they are supposed to work.

Here is my admittedly anecdotal observation: Those high-achieving kids at the top of the class are reading their Newsela Paleontology articles. They are taking the quizzes the teacher assigned, providing the writing sample, and doing the critical thinking activity that is to be turned in for a grade. But despite regular redirection the kids at the bottom of the class and the more distractible kids in the middle are doing… something else, at least until I am nearby. As I approach, they click back to the picture of dinosaur bones that I saw the last two times I circled the room. Of more concern, a number of kids in the crowd are not bothering to read the quiz associated with the reading since there is no grade associated with that “self-learning” quiz. Then they are laughing about their zeroes. One girl yesterday asked me to give her the letters of the answers. “Can’t you just tell me? You know, CAEE or something?”

If I wasn’t a teacher and did not feel compelled to teach the material the classroom teacher provided me, those laptops would be a tremendous win. I could sit at the front of the room and watch as the screens quieted the classroom. The kids would look busy. I could wander out a few times to make people click away from the snakes game and go back to staring at the picture of the dinosaur bones, and the fiction of classroom learning would be maintained. But I know better. The kids know better, too, but the ones ignoring the assignment have decided they can catch up later or that paleontology simply isn’t worth the effort. I assume they mostly made up some version of a critical thinking response to turn in for a grade.

This picture’s not as bleak as I painted. I circled the room I am describing and redirected kids nonstop. A great deal of work was accomplished. But I also know that not all subs are getting in their 10,000 steps. Not all teachers are able to endlessly circle a room all day.

The problem with technology is that it works best for motivated students, Sometimes technology only works for motivated students. For the distracted and distractible, technology unfortunately offers a gateway to other worlds which have nothing to do with education. In contrast, paper and pencils can be used to doodle or write notes, but doodles have a much more benign effect on learning than YouTube videos, despite that occasional middle-school penis that gets scribbled on papers or desks.

Providing fewer temptations would be a kindness for those kids who are struggling to stay in the academic game. I am not advocating doing away with the laptops. But radical cutbacks might be the best move U.S. education has made in the last few decades.