Maybe in some state somewhere the situation is not quite as bad as my headline above.
Please share this post with PARENTS.
Here’s what I know: That state standardized test was given in late spring and didn’t ever come back for weeks or even months. During the year of the first PARCC administration, it didn’t come back until sometime during the fall of the NEXT school year.
Parents may think these tests are providing useful data. Useful to whom? Not to the classroom teacher. Even if the data comes back before the end of the school year, which is not always the case, no one breaks the data down in any helpful fashion for classroom teaching. No one tells me Jared does not understand percentages. They may tell me that Sadie has fallen far behind in reading, but if I have not figured that out for myself by the end of the school year, I am a genuinely awful teacher.
THOSE TESTS ARE PRETTY NEARLY USELESS TO TEACHERS.
State standardized tests provide big data to the government. That’s their purpose. They don’t help individual students. But they do, directly and indirectly, steal weeks of your child’s instructional time. I can’t be teaching while I am testing. More importantly, I may be forced to teach your child inappropriate material because my efforts are supposed to be pointed at a test that does not match my individual students’ learning levels.
OPT OUT. Because I am learning nothing that will help me to educate your son or daughter. I am just wasting all of our time, so that someone in Washington can reaffirm for the ten-millionth time that there seems to be a correlation between poverty and low standardized test scores.
How strange has education become? When I was in high school, I confess I skipped school every so often to go to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington. Groups of us would stand near the bus stop while the truant officer glared. Truant officers didn’t seem much more effective back then than they are today. But my friends and I would never have taken the bus across town on a day when we had an important test, and our parents were justifiably upset when the school called to tell them what we had done — even outraged in some cases.* Parenting tip: Grounding a reader doesn’t work well if you take her to the library first.
But today skipping school may even be sanctioned by parents. Our irrational tests have spawned opt out movements across the nation as parents attempt to pull their children out of harm’s way. More parents all the time are opting their children out of standardized testing.
I am now recommending opting out in my blog. I feel I have no choice. The years keep passing by, and longer, more complicated, and steadily less appropriate tests continue to come down the pike, despite numerous pleas by educators and others. If COVID could not stop the march of the standardized tests — and even the Biden administration wants testing to go forward — then I support parents taking control and exempting their children from this ritual.
Someone must take control SOON. As it stands now, no one seems able to answer one vital question related to the kids at the bottom of the testing pile-up: How are we going to fix the kids that we are breaking, the ones not lucky enough to stay home or in study halls on test days? Because while many US students are rolling with the US testing regimen, others are taking a volley of regular hits to their self-confidence and self-esteem that will not be easily — if ever — repaired.
We are using kids to get our government data, and “using” is exactly the right word. Then we give them their test scores, showing them exactly where they are in respect to everyone else. We have done this for decades, of course — but that annual test gained orders of magnitude of importance over the last twenty years, a legacy of No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile, electives and vocational/technical education faded or even vanished as school districts threw more and more of their resources toward classes directly designed to improve test scores.
Please, readers, especially older readers who went to school in saner times: Try to imagine being a kid in the 30th percentile on a measure that you have been told is the most important aspect of your whole school year. You can’t help but feel you failed, even if there was no way to succeed, for whatever reason. Because sometimes there is no way to succeed, whether it’s because you speak Spanish at home or because you missed months of school due to a traumatic brain injury or any of the thousands of reasons why different students don’t score well.
Eduhonesty: I am not against testing. We do have to be able to compare Memphis to Chicago to Seattle. We do have to identify at-risk groups. But we don’t need the Godzilla-like MONSTER that today’s testing has become. Testing this spring will be fed by toxic fears and researcher radiation in a time when childhood is struggling and too often losing its fights against electronic and other forces.
Tests can be done without structuring a district’s whole instruction around beating the test — a process that makes education less fun and also devalues learning for its own sake. Districts should not be losing weeks of education to tests — especially since the educational losses from that time hit the most disadvantaged kids the hardest. During my years teaching, I never got a SINGLE, ACTIONABLE piece of information back from a state standardized test in time to be of any use to me in the classroom.
Weeks of lost time — with ZERO to show for it in the classroom itself.
That’s absurd. That’s true. And that’s why we have to pull back, pull our kids out if necessary, and shut this ridiculous data pipeline down.
*I was enough of a nerd that my mother actually felt reassured when I skipped school to walk the beach with friends. When busted I would end up with the special note, “Please excuse my daughter because she was indisposed.” If I was sick, the note read, “Please excuse my daughter because she was ill.” She would explain to me that she was not going to lie for me since lying was unacceptable. But going to the beach obviously was acceptable. Across the years, I remain grateful for my wacky parenting.
I’ve recently posted ways in which that spring state standardized test hurts students. Here’s a subtle and cumulative effect that hurts teachers, one that’s happening all over the country.
It’s a short, simple phrase: The kids can’t… Maybe it is followed by “add fractions” or “tell time” or any of a thousand-plus possibilities. And sometimes that phrase is absolutely true. Among my most aggravating teaching moments were those when I tried to explain that my kids could not, in fact, do material that the administration had nonetheless required because “it’s on the test.”
Still, this phrase should be viewed with caution and trepidation. “The kids can’t” has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I present this as another reason to opt-out and shut down the madness of today’s testing culture, a reason I don’t think I have ever read elsewhere. Let me try to explain my slightly convoluted idea using an example:
I am the teacher. The administration has told me that my 4th period class, in which one student is testing two years below grade level and everyone else is at least four years below grade level, must do grade-level algebra problems because these problems will be on the state standardized test in late spring. Very limited remediation time or support is available. I may naturally look at this scenario and declare, “But my class cannot do these problems.”
I am right. Especially with all the required tests going on throughout the year, I don’t have a realistic shot at pulling this group up four full years mathematically in a few months. I might be able to find a magic carpet for one or two gifted kids who just arrived from Cambodia or the like, but basically my administration might as well have asked me to teach the group to plan the next spacecraft landing on Mars.
My question: what happens if this scenario repeats too often? When I am repeatedly asked to teach a process because “it’s on the test” to kids who are years behind grade level when they arrive in my classroom, I find myself repeatedly saying “My kids cannot do this.” I may be right. The kid who cannot add fractions cannot do eighth grade math. That’s simply a fact. The fractions must come first. Remediation must come first.
Let’s skip all the issues involved in catching up the children who have fallen behind. I want to look at one aspect of this scenario: I keep saying, aloud or to myself, “the kids can’t do it.” After awhile, I may come to believe what I am saying, EVEN WHEN IT IS NOT TRUE. The kids can’t do “it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy when I do not teach “it” because I have already concluded — perhaps correctly but perhaps not — that “it” is impossible.
This is a mindset issue, but not one that simply results from selecting unfortunate words. If I have a group of kids that mostly cannot clear a four-foot high bar, being told that I must prepare them to clear an eight-foot high bar represents a disconnect with reality. Too much disconnection and my go-to internal messaging may go haywire. In place of “this is what we must do to master Topic X,” I am regularly starting with “the kids can’t…” instead. Once I get stuck in that place then, yes, they can’t. They can’t because I won’t even try to get them over the bar, viewing that effort as essentially futile.
This all began with that spring standardized test and an administration desperate to pick up points on that test — so desperate that rational instruction fell by the wayside. What happens to the teacher who keeps being told to force her students to leap tall buildings in a single bound? One thing that may happen is a subtle attitude shift from “we can do it” to “my students can’t.”
“My students can’t” is not a phrase we want teachers to be using often, even when it’s true, maybe especially when it’s true. Students sense when a teacher believes in them and they sense when he or she lacks confidence in their ability to complete the latest standard projected up onto the whiteboard. They may not understand that their teacher has simply made a rational judgment about an irrational academic expectation. Instead they may think that their teacher lacks faith in THEM. Meanwhile, we are wearing a groove into that teacher’s set of self-messages, one that starts with “my kids can’t…”
Those spring standardized tests work directly against rational expectations based on past performance. After a teacher has been told to plan another Mars landing too many times, that teacher may give up on teaching topics that remain eminently useful and doable. That teacher didn’t exactly lose faith in students. Instead, he or she lost faith in rational curricular planning.
But the effect of this loss of faith will be the same regardless of its source. Set the bar too high and everybody may fail. Some kids will jump higher. Other kids will quit and walk off the field. Some teachers will begin stealth teaching — teaching what their students should learn next in a rational universe rather than whatever pie-in-the-sky standard is pasted on the board. Other teachers will try to teach those standards because that’s what their group is expected to be teaching, whether that content makes sense for their particular group or not.
Reason #42 for opting out of this year’s big test: When the test determines the curriculum — as it almost always does today — that curriculum may fit nobody in a special education, bilingual or even regular classroom. That results in a substandard education, potentially for every student in the classroom.
This set-up also results in a teacher who has to keep saying, “my kids can’t…” until those words sometimes create the reality they once merely described.
Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s scrap those spring state tests altogether. If government and educational leaders balk — and the Biden administration recently betrayed us by putting the spring tests back on the schedule — I hope parents will opt their children out of state testing on a national basis.
Opting out can help us move away from today’s brick monoliths.
Here’s the vital number that inspired my retirement and this post: During my final year teaching, all classes were obliged to test for more than 20% of the school year — two benchmark tests, PARCC (the year of two, separate administrations), unit tests prepared by an outside consulting firm, and weekly quizzes designed by departments to prepare students for the unit tests. That left 36 * 0.8 = 28.8 weeks available for instruction, except the number was actually smaller. We had to go over MAP test results with students, devote time to PBIS behavioral support plans, and all those nitty gritty little extras that suck minutes at odd moments.
Instead of trying to stuff 240 days’ (48 school weeks) worth of knowledge into 28 weeks of available time, this nation desperately needs to abandon remotely concocted, utopian master plans and, instead, hand control back to the classroom teacher.
(Let’s be clear: The Common Core standards work poorly in academically-disadvantaged communities. teaching that much content effectively would require more than the full 36 weeks of a school year. In a mere 28 weeks, even the most gifted teachers and students have a snowball’s chance in hell.)
Eduhonesty: Sometimes nobody’s listening. Various school and government leaders keep pushing for testing right now and somehow we have to get their attention. We have to pull the lever that will send this train off the track. Because the train must be derailed. We have been throwing students off the train for decades anyway, straight into ravines off bridges set so high that no one can see the bottom in the mists below. Lost kids? We’ve lost so many as our tests and standards hammered children, children who were sometimes happy to dive out that train window or fill out the high school early exit forms.
I favor channeling Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. We can be peaceful. We can behave like civilized, sensible parties in this ongoing dispute over the urgent requirement for megatons of data dynamite. Not everyone has to stay home to make opting out work. All we need are ENOUGH students out eating ice cream and watching Netflix. As the numbers of students who opt out grows, the reliability and validity of test results falls. We no longer know if the population we are measuring reflects the population as a whole. We can destroy the usefulness of the data. Once we do, those tests should be relegated back to their old status of a useful exercise in intelligence gathering, rather than the purpose of a whole year’s worth of instruction.
We must do this. I know I sound like a gouged, repeating piece of vinyl on an antique record player, but here’s one more repetition of my driving theme: These tests are clobbering kids psychologically.
Maybe my readers are not having my classroom experience. Not all kids are taking a hard hit. Children who test well tend to do alright, for example. But many children do not test well. Anxious and academically-deficient kids feel especially beaten up by our spring rite of passage. I believe state achievement tests certainly form part of the rising problem of anxiety disorders in children today.
These annual tests are also responsible for today’s pie-in-the-sky curricula. In many locations, predetermined curricula demand that kids learn what may be 48 weeks of work in only 28 weeks of school. That’s impossible for all but extraordinarily gifted kids. The result? If the tests themselves don’t put cracks in kids’ psyches, that curriculum death march can do the job all by itself. Schools that try to cover the entire content of the test by spring may simply be moving much too fast for either retention or comprehension.
Please, please, please. Reader, do you have children? Grandchildren? Don’t let them take those annual spring achievement tests.
