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.