Testing..... Week One

This week marks the first week of state testing.  Ugh.  I hate it.  It represents everything that is wrong with education today.  High stakes, teaching to a test, meaningless results, narrowing of the curriculum, etc.....  But test I must, so every year for six days I torture eight-year-olds.  This is why I got into teaching.

Day 1 - Part 1 of the English Language Arts Test:  As I circulate the room, making sure students are on task, I hear a whisper from one of my kiddos, "Eenie meenie miney mo," as his pencil point goes back and forth between two answers.  Hey, at least he had narrowed it down to two!  I couldn't bear to look and see if one of the two was the right answer.  Sigh.

Day 2 -  Part 1 of the Math Test:  Dead silence as we begin the test.  One of my students announces, "I am sick!  I am feeling queasy, which means I just might PUKE!"  Fabulous.  As I shush him while the whole class looks on, he tells me he is fine - he can go on.  I tell him if he feels bad to let me know.  Then the heavy breathing starts.  Like an obscene phone caller, this kid starts breathing so heavy all of the kids around him are totally distracted and staring at him.  Are you kidding me???????  So I move him to another table with less kids and ask him to curb his breathing.  He then realizes he needs the bathroom immediately.  Upon his return, he announces. "Nope!  Nothing came out!"  Great. Thanks for sharing.  After a few more minutes, the child cannot go on anymore.  He tells me the only reason he came to school was to take the stupid test!  So I send him to the office with my student teacher.  On the way up to the office, he explains how he feels in more detail, "I feel like I am gonna burp, and then I have to poop!"  He wasn't at school today.

Day 3:  Part 2 of the English Language Arts Test.  I just about died when I saw today's part of the test.  An obscene amount of stories* with comprehension questions.  Several of these stories were very long, all with a small font.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME???????  Don't you think we can figure out if they can do this crap with maybe just two stories?  Why so many?????  Heavy sigh.  I have to say, the little chickens did great the first two days of testing.  I mean, I have no clue how they did, but they worked their butts off.  Today was different.  The amount of stories broke their collective can-do spirit.  I watched as many of them counted how many pages they had to do, with looks of anguish on their faces.  I had a few fast finishers.... not because they were finished, but because they were DONE.  And about one third of the class managed to skip the exact same story and corresponding questions.  Of course the proctor and I made sure they went back and completed every little morsel of torture.  Hey!  One question can mean the difference between Far Below Basic and Below Basic dammit!

And so week one is done.  The chickadees will have a few days of rest, then it's back to it next week.  Can't wait.

* You may be wondering, how many stories were there?  I wrote the exact number in my first draft.  Then I got paranoid thinking I might get in trouble for divulging the contents of the test and the testing Nazis might come and rip my fingernails out.

National Standards: Friend, Foe, or Irrelevant?

As more and more states adopt the Common Core National Standards for K-12, I find myself unsure about my feelings toward these standards. My gut feeling when I first heard about them was: they are evil. One size fits all is never a good thing. Then I thought that maybe the standards will raise the bar for students in some states, and that is a good thing. In California, the Common Core standards are actually easier for my grade level than what I have to teach now (which is good considering many of the current standards are 100% developmentally inappropriate). Then again, the adoption of the Core allows for states to change the Core by 15%. Who knows what that might mean in California.

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham points out that there is no correlation between the quality of state standards and NAEP scores (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/willingham-whats-missing-from.html#more). Willingham contends that either standards are irrelevant to schooling, or that academic outcomes are determined by a multitude of factors. He thinks the latter is the case. Standards help, but they are not enough.

I agree with Willingham. Education of our children is a complex issue, yet No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top treat it so simplistically. It all boils down to test scores - high stakes testing. As David Berliner illustrates in his book Collateral Damage, high stakes testing only corrupts education. And with standards being "an inch deep and a mile wide," students learn very little that they will retain and actually use.

After reading up on the national standards and having conversations with fellow educators (most recently Mary Cowhey, author of Black Ants and Buddhists), I have come to the conclusion, at least for myself, that standards are irrelevant. I am not saying standards are not important - I think it is important that we have meaningful and attainable standards. But whether these standards are the state of California's or the Common Core's does not matter. (Although I do think both need to be narrowed down a great deal.) What matters is HOW the standards are taught. No matter what the content happens to be, if that content is not taught in a meaningful, relevant, and comprehensible manner, the students will not learn. Oh sure, they might memorize facts and formulas for a test. I did that all through college. Once the test was over, the knowledge was gone. Except of course for the classes (that I can count on one hand) where the professors actually taught. Standing up there and lecturing is not teaching. The only person interacting with the curriculum is the lecturer. Bubbling in answers does not assess learning. It only shows how strong of a test-taker you are.

As Susan Ohanian puts it, "Let's stop focusing on the hole and pay more attention to the bagel." Let's start creating spaces for learning where students engage in curriculum authentically. Let's have standards that allow students to delve "an inch wide and a mile deep." Let's make sure we teach students, not content.