Reply to Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd be really curious to dig into the data to understand exactly what they're describing as standardized/mandated testing. For instance, the chart shows that the average number of mandated tests in kindergarten is 6. Sure, my child probably did around that last year, if you count every single reading and math assessment done at the beginning, middle and end of the year to find out where the child was starting from (essential for differentiated instruction, which everyone seems to love), and to confirm how he was progressing. They were barely a blip for him, and I can't imagine how a teacher could feasibly determine everyone's skill level at the beginning of the year, and then provide parents with concrete feedback on how their kids were doing at the end of the year, without doing *something*. [/quote]

I want to know this, too.

And I also want to know what prepping for the test means. If a test covers the curriculum in a meaningful way, you teach to the curriculum which is teaching to the test.  In theory, I see no problem with this.  If, however, the tests, curriculum, and teaching are not aligned, or if the curriculum or tests are not addressing the key knowledge and skills we value, and if teachers then "teach to the test/curriculum" then, yup, a waste of time.

Any good educator needs to be constantly assessing what he/she is teaching and what his/her students know. The question is, how do they do that?  How are they communicating their results to others (because parents, other teachers, and administrators need to be certain kids are learning, too)? There has to be some level of consistency in the system so the stakeholders can understand and trust each other.

As you can see, I'm not anti-testing. But I do care that it's done right.  It's not sufficient for me that a teacher says, "Oh, your kid is doing fine." In fact, I spent $$$ recently for an independent evaluator to administer a bunch of standardized assessments to confirm and more specifically zero in on what I had suspected all along was a learning challenge that the classroom teachers and school instructional support staff had pooh-poohed.

[/quote]

I can't speak about all schools, but in the Title I school where I worked a few years ago, kids in grades 3 took SOL tests in 4 subjects, grade 4 took 3, and 5 took 2, and I think 6 took 3.  At the beginning of the year, two weeks were dedicated to school-wide practice SOL tests in each subject.  That meant grade 3 students spend 4 complete days testing, grade 4 spend 3 days, and so on.  Of course, during those 2 weeks, special ed teachers, counselors, and ESL teachers were forced to proctor the practice tests and couldn't teach.  Specials were canceled, the library closed, and so on.

Then mid-year, the same thing happened again.  Another 10 days lost to "practice" testing.

Then again at the end of the year.

So that's a total of 12 days spent testing for 3rd graders, for example.  But that's just the SOL tests.

ESL students had an additional 2 days of testing each in each grade level (which meant another 2 weeks of testing and not proctoring exams for the ESL teachers).

There are other tests as well, in other grades, and they varied from year to year.  But 12 full days of testing for an 8 year old, plus 6 weeks of disrupted instruction and facilities usage for the entire school, 2-3 months total of administering tests instead of teaching for numerous specialists, and a host of miscellaneous things that go along with that, and the process has completely taken over education.  By the time I quit, I felt like a tester, not a teacher.

And test prep is all we did - that means that when we did reading, we used test passages, not books.  When we did math, we used test questions from old SOL's, not any kind of innovative math instruction.  In art kid couldn't be creative, they had to make a collage of images that related to some SOL standards in social studies, and in music they sang songs about what the native americans ate.  The quality of this "education" was absolutely pathetic.  [/quote]

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