Too often today, our lower readers are not getting their needs met. With tests dictating curriculum and curriculum dictating tests, students who need material from earlier years may never see it. A seventh-grade student reading at a fourth grade level will potentially spend the whole year staring at nothing but fundamentally unreadable materials — materials that student is forced to slowly decipher while other, better readers sail comfortably on ahead. Schools struggling to hit targets often don’t provide fourth-grade books for fourth grade readers because those books don’t address the content of the annual test. A book that seems unlikely to improve annual test scores has become a book destined to be stuffed in a box in a dark closet, hidden in one of those hidey-holes where past materials are stashed because they are too valuable to throw away, but too far off the test/curriculum to be used by schools scrounging for test points.

One irony that hardly ever enters our discussions: We sometimes have what our students need, even in the poorest of districts. We sometimes possess books that our lower readers could actively enjoy. Maybe they are hidden on the shelves behind the theater stage that is never used, not since drama was cancelled because drama was not providing enough testing bang for our buck. We may have software that meets the needs of our lower readers too, but, like those boxed books, simpler material that does not match an aggressively test-based curriculum is left behind as we open up much tougher units expected to match the year’s test.

Eduhonesty: Here’s what the Biden Administration and so many others have missed in the recent past. Those tests are not merely measuring instruments. The desire to measure our students’ learning makes perfect sense.

But the very learning those tests purport to measure now suffers directly because of the tests. My students did not merely lose learning because of the opportunity costs of testing — the fact that I could not teach them for days while I tested them. My students lost learning because they were lower-level readers who were never ALLOWED to use books they could actually read. Those books were too far below the level of the state test. Those books stayed in the closet while I desperately tried to get traction with the required books and software the district had purchased to match the 7th grade Common Core curriculum.

Books and software are expensive. Those newly bought books won’t disappear any time soon. Administrators have to justify their purchase. The better books may stay in their dark subbasement corners for years.

Spring standardized tests are not merely sucking up our most precious resource– TIME — but they are ensuring our lower-performing students receive subpar instruction during the rest of the year. Because my students never read those Common Core-based books; they deciphered them with my help, a group of scholars buried in a tomb of unknown symbol combinations.

I can’t blame administrators whose jobs are on the line for desperately trying to match instruction to future state test questions. Still, I wish more people inside and outside of education understood the consequences of that approach. How are kids supposed to learn if we teach to a test that is too far outside their understanding? What happens to that kid who is doing math at a fifth grade level when he is hit with nothing but daily work, quizzes and tests set at an eighth grade level? We waste unconscionable amounts of student time with this test-focused approach and, until we get a grip on testing, will continue to do so.

Teachers know this. I was so sad as I looked at some of those books behind the useless stage and down in the moldy subbasement. I wanted those books. I knew some of my students would love some of those books. But instructional coaches and others had already pretty much laid out my lessons for the year. There was no room left in the schedule for boxed books did not match the Common Core or that PARCC test that came before the IAR test.

No new (old) books for me! No readable new (old) books for my students! No help anywhere, even when my administrators agreed with my views. No one was willing to take a chance on a test-score decline, even when the rigid, test-focused approach we were taking was likely to CAUSE that decline.

It’s been the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party out here for awhile.

Will any of my former students become readers someday? With a few exceptions, I doubt it. We sure never made reading any fun.

What the Biden administration and so many others miss: These tests have ceased to be mere measuring instruments. They now drive instruction. But in districts that historically have not done well on these tests, they are often driving that instruction right over a cliff.