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.

PLEASE OPT OUT.