Here’s my starting truth: The hare will always beat the tortoise when the race is short and timed.

In the US, students who have grown up with access to keyboards and QWERTY keyboard practice enter the game at an undefined and unquantifiable advantage. Slow test takers can lose points simply because of their need to hunt and peck at keys. UNTIL THE TECH GAP IS CLOSED, WE WON’T BE ABLE TO ACCURATELY JUDGE THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP. One of the best students I ever had — valedictorian for her high school — got a nineteen on her ACT.* That low score was about her typing speed and nothing else but her typing speed. My former student has the ability to be a rocket scientist. But “Esmeralda” got her first, minimal exposure to proper keyboarding skills toward the end of middle school, and her high school only haphazardly emphasized typing speed.

I think it helps to visualize what I am talking about. Reader, your fingers probably automatically hit the keys when you are typing. You don’t think about letter location. I never look at the keyboard unless a mistake pops onto my screen. But suppose your fingers did not automatically find the “p” or “q”? Suppose someone shifted the letters on your keyboard? You would be staring at all the letters on the black rectangle in front of you, trying to pick out what you need. And the problem here is not simply time loss. Yes, it takes a while to find the letter “p” if you don’t know it’s location, but while you are searching you are also multitasking. Your attention has been diverted away from the test problem to the more immediate problem of getting your answer down.

We know multitasking affects performance and work quality. “Indeed, performing several decisive tasks in parallel reduces your overall performance by 20 to 50% while extending the completion time from 30% to 200% and multiplying the number of errors made. All this causes intense and lasting mental exhaustion,” according to Multitasking in Project Management | Reasons to Avoid Multitasking (businessstudynotes.com)

Eduhonesty: I consider it ironically possible that the aggressive push to get technology into the hands of disadvantaged students may help make up for COVID learning loss. For younger students, this push may even end up closing the achievement gap somewhat despite that learning loss. Our younger Esmeraldas are learning to type early enough so that their ability to rocket across a keyboard may only minimally affect their actual final test score results when they are older.

But in the meantime, that push may also create the appearance of progress where progress does not exist. Improved keyboarding skills have the potential to raise scores because students can supply more information more quickly. The speed with which students can get their answers down when testing can make all the difference to scores, especially for students who naturally write more slowly. But when scores go up due to speed alone — the resulting score increase might disguise learning loss.

The GIGANTIC point that gets lost today is that standardized test scores haven’t been close to trustworthy since we went to computerized testing. “Them as Gits” have had those keyboards at home, crawling up into laps to use them before they even started school. In homes with less disposable income, the keyboard was nonexistent and the internet connection was usually a phone. Phones provide information. They do not provide test practice.

Note for teachers as they start attending the year’s staff meetings: How can we get keyboarding skills out front and center as a critical requirement for student success, one that cannot wait? Amazingly enough, those skills still are often treated as adjunct to success, rather than central to success.

Note to the Biden Administration: The nationwide, standardized tests you decided were required to document the status of the achievement gap and COVID learning loss? Those tests will lie to you. And the only way I can see to solve this problem — and get more accurate data — is to return to pencils on paper for now.

*The ACT puts college readiness around 21.

How Often Should I Wash My Face Mask? (webmd.com) WebMD recommends washing after each use. There are washing instructions in the article.

That much laundry may drive teachers and parents to disposable masks. Disposable masks vary in quality, plus you don’t know where or how they have been stored. Strong recommendation from yesterday’s post: WEAR one of your kid’s new masks for awhile. Make sure it has no off odors or other uncomfortable features like a tag that should be cut off. How does it feel?

Putting masks on now should be helpful. I am seeing more parents out with masked children in the last few weeks and I support this summer masking. If the kids are going to have to mask in school anyway, I would not wait for school. That just adds one more level of weirdness to starting school. If masks have become part of everyday life, school masks will seem more normal and less distracting.

Consider spending up for the Disney Princess or Avengers mask. Masks are items of clothing and may be considered fashion statements by some children. Like the annual backpack, the “Frozen” mask may even add to a child’s comfort and confidence.

For children and adolescents who wear glasses, the below items can help with fogging. I believe they are now being called “aluminum nose bridge.” I found them originally in a craft store.

Eduhonesty: Hugs, readers. The world remains wild and we keep adapting. Wishing you all a great week. Jocelyn Turner

Are you getting ready for the next school year, reader? In my daughter’s schools, teachers are already coming back. Other teachers have only weeks before the year begins. Parents are out school shopping and I realize I ought to have written this post sooner.

COMFORT should be the key word when back to school shopping. Many children have sensory processing issues, even those who have not been and may never be recognized as having a “problem.” A definition of sorts will help here, although definitions vary and sensory issues fall into a gray area filled with hazy examples more than concrete science. But sensory processing challenges are very real and clothing does not get enough attention.

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From Sensory Processing Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment (webmd.com):

“Sensory processing disorder is a condition in which the brain has trouble receiving and responding to information that comes in through the senses. Some people with sensory processing disorder are oversensitive to things in their environment. Common sounds may be painful or overwhelming. The light touch of a shirt may chafe the skin.”

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A tag in the back of a shirt can distract a kid ALL day and, as strange as this may sound, that kid may not say anything for days, months or forever. Some kids will immediately pipe up, “Mom, I hate that white thing! It itches!” But others will simply keep scratching their neck. They will pull the fabric from their shorts or pants away from their skin. They will fiddle with their shirt, maybe pulling it away from their skin. They will do little scooching moves in their desks, shifting their position, one inch in one direction and then another inch to the side. Maybe they will scooch nonstop as the school day goes by. They may often be pulling or pushing waistbands, or simply putting their hands inside those bands to get the band away from their skin. (An act which has definitely gotten a few kids in trouble!) And despite all these subtle and not-so-subtle signs of discomfort, certain children never think to complain. That’s just how clothes work in their minds.

Sensory issues may be far less obvious at home where there are more immediate distractions and less need to stay in one position. Distractions help to distract us from our distractions. Plus students who wear uniforms to school can change out of that uniform, and other children can come home and pull out favorite baseball shirts or other changes of clothing that seem perfectly natural.

A few school shopping suggestions:

Smell the masks! I recently returned a batch to Amazon because the odor was … off. Not enough to make me immediately take off the mask, but enough so that I decided after awhile that I could not identify that faint smell and I was not comfortable using those masks. A child might keep wearing a mask with a faint, unfamiliar smell. I’d take the new box of masks and put one on myself for awhile before I started handing them to my kids.

Watch shoes. Some kids can get attached to shoes that no longer fit. They won’t say anything when their feet start bothering them because they don’t want their favorite shoes replaced. Some kids don’t bother to say anything when their toes are getting pinched because pinched toes don’t much bother them. And feet sometimes grow in leaps and bounds.

You are looking for softness. It helps to shut your eyes and feel the fabric. As the Jedi Masters say: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.”

Take the kids if possible. Have them feel possible future school clothes. Ask them, “Do you like how it feels?” Teaching children to put comfort high on their list for clothing choices will help them for life. While shopping as a family can understandably seem too daunting, shopping together helps with the mystery of sizes. One store’s size six can be another store’s size eight. Seven-year-olds do not run true to size.

That’s the major problem with haunting the end-of-season sales. Yes, that size eight outfit may be a great price and size eight ought to be next year’s size. But some kids just rocket through the size chart. Boys especially can easily go up two or three sizes in one year.

If I had the kids with me, I’d try to get them to sit down in any pants they tried on. Many pairs of pants feel great when upright but are much less comfortable while seated at a desk. Where does the fabric bunch? If trying on multiple pairs of pants, I’d ask, “Which ones are most comfortable?” Kids will resist trying on clothes sometimes. I’d be prepared to say, “I know it’s a pain but I want you to be comfortable all day. I am doing this for you because I love you.”

The internet can be hugely helpful. Just type “sensory friendly” into your Amazon or other clothing search. You might try “soft cotton” and other similar searches, too. Sometimes guessing and maybe returning is much easier than a trip to Target, that’s for sure!

Eduhonesty: Parents whose children have pronounced sensory issues likely don’t need any shopping tips. They are already seeking sensory friendly clothing, even when they have not yet tumbled onto that specific description for what they are seeking. Anecdotally, though, I believe mild sensory processing concerns in children are often overlooked. Even teachers may simply get used to watching the scooching. Because some children will scooch nonstop regardless of what they are wearing — clothed or naked, the average kid is not meant to sit still in any one place for a long period of time.

Here’s a quote for the day: “Once you are comfortable in your own skin, you will become unstoppable.”
― Christine E. Szymanski

I don’t know that Christine is right about that unstoppable part 🙂 but I do know Itching can short circuit thinking. Discomfort is distracting. Discomfort can block learning. Here’s a thought-provoking read that lays out some sensory processing issues and provides a good overview: Understanding Sensory Processing Disorder | Understood – For learning and thinking differences

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And now for something completely different! This blog used to write about many topics that had nothing to do with the evils of excessive standardized testing. I’ll be back to that testing soon because I believe excess testing has become a vicious contributor to the achievement gap. But sometimes we all need a break. Thanks to all my readers! Jocelyn Turner

P.S. Using unscented, hypoallergenic detergent always helped my kids, while fabric softeners and dryer sheets were problematic for us.

Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta, Jun 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM*

In my last posts, I barely touched on the larger question of “Barney’s” morale and self-esteem. What does it mean emotionally to have fallen below grade level — perhaps even years below grade level? Silence on this issue ignores one extremely potent argument against increased testing: Too often, we leave behind a trail of emotional devastation with these nonstop tests, depending on the resilience and obliviousness of kids who may be neither resilient nor oblivious.

Let me pull a few paragraphs from the Chicago Tribune link at the top.

“’During springtime, our units with children and adolescents would fill to capacity during testing season,” said (Katie) Osgood, recalling the years she was a teacher at a Chicago hospital’s psychiatric unit.

“We would see children arriving by ambulance directly from testing sessions with things like self-harm … banging their heads on desks, pulling out all of their eyelashes … panic attacks, and we’d see suicidal ideation,” Osgood said.”

I recall a student who carved a word in his arm after one of these tests — a self-criticism that landed him a psychiatric hospital stay. I knew that boy, a hard-working child who was straddling the categories of bilingual and special education. He was trying so hard, but he could not answer the questions in front of him. He had no chance. That test was pitched years above the academic level where he was actually functioning. Special education and bilingual teachers especially know these kids.

I have seen students break into tears during these tests. I have seen quiet acts of defiance, students who put their heads down on their desks and simply refused to start testing. I watched as a student went from trying to answer questions to writing pure gobbledygook on one form, extended response free-association that made almost no sense.

We break some of these kids.

Eduhonesty: I have said what I wanted to say today. I will repeat: We break some of these kids. The percentage may be tiny, but that percentage is spread across all fifty states of this nation.

We have made these standardized tests the focus of instruction and the only barometers of success. What if a kid can’t do what the test demands? We have millions of failing children across the country. We know this. All we have to do is look at standardized test scores across our schools and our states. Or we can simply look at some of the daily work teachers are receiving.

This yellow unit test page is from the year when I was regularly required to give seventh grade Common Core problems to ALL my students so that teachers had comparable data to use to plan instruction. The problem asked students to determine the probability that a family will create a pizza with pepperoni and black olives if the given meat choices are hamburger, sausage and pepperoni and the vegetable choices are mushrooms, black olives and onions. My picture shows a student’s entire answer. The “common instructional plan” that led to this test was not so much a plan as a massacre for the boy or girl who wrote the answers below.

We keeping looking at the gasping fish at the bottom of the tree and throwing salt on them, as far as I am concerned.

*Reader, if you have not read the recent post about “Fred” and “Barney,” please see Let’s “Math” this problem: Why our Overzealous Testing Disproportionately Discriminates Against the Kids Who Have Already Fallen Over the Cliff | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com), in which I detailed reasons why increased testing hurts Barney more than Fred.

** Apparently Albert Einstein is not the source of this quote. No one seems to be able to track it back to its source.

The Question Too Many Legislators and Educational Bureaucrats Neglect to Answer: What if You Are Not Hermione Granger?

I want to go sideways today to make a sobering observation, one I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. The people who rise to high office are usually good or even excellent test takers. That man or woman with decision-making power within a government hierarchy? The trauma of test taking may be utterly foreign to that person. While not always true, the ability to do well on standardized tests helps predict a person’s chances of getting into the best colleges, and the best colleges have always made pathways to success shorter and easier. The following example illustrates this fact.

From How many American Congressmen have attended Ivy League schools? – Answers:

“…In the present 112th US Congressional session, there are 27 Senators with at least one Ivy League degree–either undergraduate, graduate or both. More interestingly there are 44 US Senators with at least one degree from an Ivy League school or other comparable elite institution of higher learning. This includes top law schools like New York University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and University of Texas. Also included are the top three liberal arts colleges in the nation–Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams –and prestigious institutions like Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the UK, and Georgetown (which is heavily represented), Duke, Stanford and other highly regarded non-Ivy universities. Couple this with most Senators being millionaires, and you start realizing how unrepresentative Congress–or at least the Senate–really is.”

Eduhonesty: How do you get into those schools? Especially in the past, ACT, SAT and other standardized test scores were often deciding factors. My point is simple. No doubt we can find exceptions but, overall, the people deciding to test and add more tests cannot viscerally understand the impact of their choices. They may even have enjoyed test days. Back before test score emphasis felt so frantic — back when most of these legislators and top educational bureaucrats were young — that test was an annual feather in their caps, another 90% or higher in most or all categories that resulted in a guidance counselor pointing them toward Stanford, Williams, Cornell or the best their region had to offer.

These leaders do not and cannot understand the impact of their choices to increase testing. Too many of them were the Hermione Grangers, or at least Ron Weasleys, of their student body.

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From my next post: Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta, Jun 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM*

“During springtime, our units with children and adolescents would fill to capacity during testing season,” said (Katie) Osgood, recalling the years she was a teacher at a Chicago hospital’s psychiatric unit.

I’d like to invent some hypothetical math that makes a simple point: The plan by the Illinois State Board of Education to triple the number of annual standardized assessments for students will most hurt the students who are already behind. I can prove this.

Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune

To start, I am going to invent two students. I will call them Fred and Barney.

Fred is a bit above grade level. In order to be ready for the next year, he requires 150 days of instruction. Yes, I just invented Fred, but there are many Freds in the system. These students tend to test decently.

Barney has fallen a few years behind grade level. To be ready for the next year — that is, to cover the past curriculum he somehow failed to master and then reach grade level — Barney requires 320 days of instruction with supplemental evening and week-end tutoring. Barney doesn’t test well, of course. That’s how we know he is significantly behind grade level. In some Chicago public schools, many members of the student body qualify as a Barney. *

In my above example, Barney needs 320 days to “catch up” to grade level. In real life, that number might be 290 or 510 days. An exact count would be impossible to determine. The concept “grade level” is in constant motion, as is Barney. Grade level can change radically with one sweep of the standards too. Many on-target students stumbled down the stairs toward the basement with the arrival of the Common Core standards and related tests.

A lot of factors are in play and my learning curve is not actually linear. Barney may learn at an average or even faster pace and may have fallen behind due to missing school and moving frequently. Barney may be a slow learner with undiagnosed dyslexia. But whatever the source of his lower achievement, he’s behind. He will require extra instruction to catch up, extra instruction that may not exist for him, especially since we now try to pack every minute of every school day with standards-based instruction.

Now let’s look at the math. I want to show how the three-test-more-testing plan discriminates against poor Barney. My last school year, I lost over 1/5th of the year to testing, but we will assume less loss here. Let’s say days lost to standardized testing and benchmark tests only total 16 days, an optimistic choice of values. When I left off, the actual instructional days in Chicago Public Schools totaled 170 days.

Fred’s fine. He can be fully ready for next year, with the caveat that he’ll have to make up a bit of summer learning loss.

170 total school days – 16 test days = 154 days of instruction available to Fred. That’s enough for Fred, who is already above grade level and a fairly quick study academically. He only needs around 150 to stay at grade level. He will be ready to tackle next year’s subject matter. In numbers, 154 – 150 = +4

Barney may also have 154 instructional days. Sometimes our Barneys go to summer school, but that school is not always mandatory or even available. Barney is already deficit spending where schools days are concerned. In numbers, 154 – 320 = -166. No summer school can begin to fill this gap, especially since summer school often only runs four or five hours a day for four to six weeks.

Let’s charitably assume that Barney receives mandatory summer school for five hours a day for five weeks. We’ll count those days as 3/4s of a regular school day. In math terms, 25 days times 0.75 = 18.75 regular school days. So let’s give Barney 18.75 days credit to get a less onerous estimate: -166 + 18.75 = -147.25. After summer school, Barney now only requires an additional 147.25 extra days ON TOP OF A REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR to catch up to grade level. If this were a word problem, I would ask students what mathematical process we might use to express “on top of,” expecting to hear, “You add the numbers, Ms. Turner. ”

Barney requires 170 + 147.25 = 317.25 days total to catch up to grade level. That’s a mountain to climb — and currently we make almost no provision for our Barney’s when they have fallen that far behind. Where will the time come from to add that missing learning on top of the full, packed curriculum already laid out for his age?

We stole 16 days of instruction from these two students with standardized tests. We stole nearly 10% of the school year. With additional benchmark, AP, ACT and other tests, we may be stealing considerably more. But who feels the loss from those 16 days more?

“It’s only another 3 days or six days or week and a half,” our leaders will offer as justification when the increased time required for added testing hits the radar. But here’s the thing: Fred’s not falling behind. He has a margin of power around his daily academic needs. He might be a little more prepared for college calculus if he had an extra month of instruction instead of new tests during high school. Because of those tests, he might end up going for extra tutoring to help him though his first college mathematics classes. But Fred will be ready to move on to tougher material after he graduates from high school. We stole a few of Fred’s cupcakes, but Fred still has enough cupcakes to keep himself from ever going hungry.

Barney, on the other hand, is starving. He has been for a long time. That’s what phrases like “three years behind grade level” mean. He’s so academically hungry that he’s hurting unless he has decided not to care, a common response that’s sometimes the only psychic self-defense available. Barney never had any cupcakes to spare. He needs every academic week he can get — and a number he will probably never see. Every lost week leaves him more confused, and the more confused he gets, probably the more demotivated he becomes.

There’s a macabre sort of irony here: We test and test to find out where our students stand.

We keep stealing their food in order to determine how malnourished they have become.

Barney needs more time learning mathematics in math class, not more time documenting how much mathematics he does not know so that government leaders can wring their hands in public, published despair about how poor Barney is in such awful shape. It honestly makes me think of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental health problem in which a caregiver deliberately causes sickness in a child, elderly adult, or disabled person. Our Barneys are starving for learning time and are becoming hungrier all the time. Instead of feeding them, instead of teaching them, we give them weeks of extra tests and then trumpet their declining academic health.

Eduhonesty: Damn, this is crazy, and it never seems to stop. Yes, we need testing to gauge student progress, but not weeks and weeks of testing. We ought to be able to produce progress reports with one single robust benchmark test given for two days, three times a year, for a total six-day instructional loss.

We are focusing on America’s score numbers when what we ought to be focusing on is our students’ INSTRUCTIONAL TIME numbers. How much time do our students require to catch up? How can we increase the learning time they receive? We can’t improve Barney’s situation without giving him more time, yet somehow plans by government leaders and educational bureaucrats always steal time away from Barney and other struggling students instead. How hard is it to understand that testing directly steals instructional time — a commodity that the some kids can afford to lose, but others cannot?

I put numbers in this article to try to make that loss more real. This is the testing version of my last post: Them as Has Always Seems to Git More. The privileged kids in privileged districts get more — and they also lose less. Maybe both my boys lost 16 days, but the value of those days was much smaller for Fred, who did not need that instructional time to effectively stay caught up.

Meanwhile, like I said, poor Barney is starving while political leaders and educational bureaucrats keep aggressively raiding his dwindling and already inadequate supply of cupcakes.

*Incidentally, it’s extremely hard to get current information related to student academic progress right now in Illinois. The Illinois interactive state report card used to be a robust source of data. This year, however, the site blames COVID and simply does not provide many numbers. They may not have those numbers. A more sobering possibility: Perhaps those numbers came in so low that no one wants to put them up for public review.