The majority of teachers and principals in Pennsylvania hate standardized tests.
An increasing number of parents are refusing to allow their kids to take the tests.
And there may be better alternatives to the state’s Keystone Exams.
These were just some of the key findings of a blockbuster report from June 2019 by the state General Assembly’s Legislative Budget and Finance Committee.
However, now that things are returning to some semblance of normalcy, it seems that bureaucrats from the state Department of Education (PDE) are taking the wrong lessons from the report while the legislature seems to have forgotten it entirely.
The report was conducted because of legislation written by state Sen. Ryan P. Aument (R-Lancaster County). It directed the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to “study the effectiveness of standardized testing, including the Keystone Exams and SATs, and their use as indicators of student academic achievement, school building performance, and educator effectiveness.”
The key findings are as follows:
1)The majority of principals and teachers disapprove of the state’s standardized tests – both the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests given in grades 3-8 and Keystone Exams given in high school. They think these tests are ineffective, expensive and harmful to district curriculum and students.
2) State law allows parents to opt their children out of testing for one reason only – religious grounds. Parents are using this religious exemption in increasing numbers. This puts districts in danger of violating federal participation and accountability standards.
3) It has been suggested that the state allow two additional reasons for parents to opt their children out of testing – philosophical grounds and health concerns. It is unclear whether doing so would increase overall opt outs or not.
4) The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in 2015 allows the use of the SAT and/or ACT test to take the place of high school standardized testing. It has been suggested the Commonwealth replace the Keystone Exams with these tests. The report finds the ACT and/or SAT would successfully determine college readiness and reduce the overall amount of standardized testing. However, this would not allow other uses of current state tests like evaluating teacher effectiveness and school building performance.This may not matter though because the report also casts doubt on whether the current tests (PSSA and Keystone Exams) do an adequate job of assessing teacher or building performance now or even if student tests can be accurately used to evaluate teachers and schools.
There’s a lot of information here. Let’s look at each finding in turn.
1) PA Educators Hate Standardized Tests
When it comes to the PSSAs, 67% of principals and 76% of teachers said the tests were ineffective indicators of student achievement.
There was slightly more support for the Keystone Exams. This time 45% of principals said the test was an ineffective indicator of student achievement (with 27% saying the tests were effective). Meanwhile, 60% of teachers said the test was ineffective.
Both principals and teachers said their curriculum had been narrowed to prepare students for PSSAs and Keystone Exams. Instead of going into more depth on regular classwork or learning new skills, the focus shifts to teaching to the tests.
Most principals (approximately 80-90%) said that students are taught test-taking skills, and their schools administered practice tests, bench-mark tests, and/or diagnostic tests to prepare students for the PSSA exams. This held for teachers, too, with 81-88% saying they teach test-taking skills and administer practice tests. Principals also said the costs of this additional test prep varied from $200 to more than $100,000.
Taking the tests also eats up valuable class time. Administering the assessments takes between 5.7 to 8 days for each kind of test – the PSSA and the Keystone Exams, according to Principals.
In addition, the report details the cost of giving these tests. In fiscal year 2017-2018, PDE paid $42.17 million for these tests. This is part of a national trend:
“Standardized tests and test preparation have subsequently become big business and that multibillion dollar business continued to grow since the enactment of NCLB and the subsequent enactment of ESSA. According to the Pew Center on the States, annual state spending on standardized tests increased from $423 million before the NCLB (enacted in 2002) to upwards of $1.1 billion in 2008 (to put this in perspective this reflects a 160 percent increase compared to a 19.22 percent increase in inflation during the same time period). A more recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brooking put the cost at upwards of $1.7 billion in 2011 related to state spending on standardized tests.”
2) Opt Outs on the Rise
Many states allow parents to opt their children out of standardized testing. Some do so in cases of a physical disability, medical reasons, or emergencies. A few allow opt-outs based on religious objection – like Pennsylvania. Some states allow opt-outs for any reason whatsoever.
The religious exemption is not used widespread throughout the state and most schools meet the 95% participation rate required by the federal government. However, use of the religious exemption is definitely on the rise – enough so that the authors of the report find it alarming:
“Meanwhile, as previously indicated in this section, schools throughout the country are experiencing and grappling with an increase in the number of parents seeking to have their children opt-out of standardized testing now that new state assessments have been implemented pursuant to the federal requirements. Pennsylvania is no exception to this trend and is also experiencing an increase in the number of parents utilizing the religious opt-out.”
For the PSSA tests, opt outs increased from 2013-14 to 2016-17. However, total numbers in school year 2017-18 decreased sightly.
Opt outs went from 1,886 to 6,425 to 15,644 to 19,012 to 16,961.
During the same time period for the Keystone Exams, opt outs steadily increased each year but were at lower overall rates.
For the high school test, opt outs went from 382 to 666 to 1,000 to 1,313 to 1,633.
These are vitally important figures because opt out data is rarely tabulated and released to the public. Many media accounts actually state the opposite of the data in this report – in particular that opting out has decreased since Congress passed the ESSA in 2015. Apparently the media got this one wrong.
Though the religious opt-out is the only reason specifically allowed in state Chapter 4 regulations, PDE reports there are five additional ways that students end up not taking the tests:
1) Other Parental Request – parents simply refusing to let their kids participate but not objecting based on specifically religious reasons.
2) No Attempt and No Exclusion Marked – students who are given the test but do not answer enough questions to receive a score.
3) No Test – no test record on file for unknown reasons.
4) Extended Absence – a student missed the testing and make-up window due to absences.
5) Other – does not fit any of the other categories.
Federal law – in particular No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and subsequent reauthorizations of that legislation – requires states to use student participation in standardized testing as a factor in a state’s accountability system. According to the report, any district with less than 95% of students taking the test should be “addressed.”
The report does not go into any further detail about what this means, other than to say that falling under 95% can:
“…ultimately result in a reduced achievement/proficiency measure… If the student participation rate falls below 95 percent, states are required to calculate student achievement/proficiency by dividing the number of students scoring proficiently by no less than 95 percent of the total students (which effectively assigns a score of “0” to all nonparticipants once the participation rate has fallen below 95 percent).”
In effect, the district gets a bad mark on a piece of paper. So what?
Under NCLB, schools with poor performance could receive sanctions like state takeover or lower funding. However, this is extremely unlikely – especially since the passing of ESSA. This newest reauthorization of the law gives states leeway in designing their accountability systems. It leaves the enforcement of this 95% participation rate up to the states, requiring them to develop an accountability plan in the event that a school or district fails to meet this standard.
So a school would only be punished if the state decided to do so. If a state legislature decided to allow parents to opt their children out for any reason at all, they would not have to take any punitive measures. Since the ESSA, the buck stops at the state house door on this one. California, for example, takes note of low participation rates but these rates are not factored into a school’s rating. On the other hand, Florida mandates direct intervention from the state’s Department of Education until participation rates are met.
3) Impact of New Reasons to Opt Out
This is where things get a bit sticky.
The report mentions the idea of expanding the options for opting-out of statewide assessments (e.g., PSSA and Keystone Exams) to include objections based on philosophical grounds or due to health issues.
On the one hand, the authors write “The impact of adding opt-out categories may be minimal.” They don’t know if more people would use the expanded options or if the same numbers who use the religious exemption today might simply divide themselves up among all three options.
The authors worry, however, that new pathways to opt out may increase the total number of people refusing the tests for their children and would reduce Pennsylvania’s participation rate in standardized testing.
This is a particularly troubling paragraph:
“The existence of opt-outs (religious or otherwise) has the potential to negatively impact a state’s participation rates and may potentially impact a state’s [Local Education Agency (LEAs)] and schools achievement/proficiency rate and ultimately the ability of a state to be in compliance with federally required assessments and accountability measures. Furthermore, providing opt-outs and giving parents notice of such has the potential to conflict with the message about the importance of standardized testing. Ultimately placing the state departments of education and local school districts in the potentially awkward position of having to explain why it is important for students to participate in testing (given the federal requirements), while also giving and notifying parents of the opt-out options for their children. In 2015, US Department of Education sent out letters to a dozen states flagging their low participation rates (statewide, or at the district or subgroup level) on the 2014-15 school year assessments and indicated that they needed to create a plan to reduce opt-outs due to low participation rates.”
This seems to be the order of the day at PDE. It’s why earlier this year, school administrators were advised by state officials to crack down on parents opting their children out of standardized tests.
And all of it is based on a cowardly and incomplete understanding of federal law. If Commonwealth schools fall below 95% participation in the test and get a bad mark on a worthless metric, it doest have to matter. No matter how many letters the federal government sends to the state legislature or PDE, the law is clear. The state is in charge here. Our legislature can choose to side with taxpayers, residents, and citizens or with civil servants and strongly worded letters.
4) Replacing the Keystone Exams
There’s not much more to add to this than the initial finding.
The authors of the report say there would be no problem with replacing the Keystone Exams with the ACT or SAT because these national tests would properly assess students’ college and career readiness.
The report is actually pretty shoddy in this regard not really examining the claims of the College Board which makes both tests. The authors just pretty much accepted the College Board’s word wholesale. Nor was their any evaluation of what teachers and principals thought about these tests like there had been for the PSSA and Keystone Exams.
However, the report does make a good point about test reduction. Many students already take the SAT or ACT test, so eliminating the Keystones would reduce the over all amount of tests they had to take.
Also the authors deserve credit for writing about how using student test scores to evaluate teachers and schools is seriously bad practice.
According to the report, 77 percent of principals and 93 percent of teachers said PSSA tests were not effective indicators for teacher evaluations, with similar figures for the Keystone Exams and building performance evaluations.
While everything in the report may not be 100% accurate, it includes important information that should be wider known.
In addition, the report has trustworthy data about opt outs throughout the Commonwealth. Unlike what has been reported in the media, opting out is not on the decline, it is on the rise.
The Keystone Exams should be thrown in the trash, because that’s what they are – trash. At very least they should be replaced with the SAT or ACT. Even better to remove any requirement for standardized tests wholesale – and that includes the PSSA.
The ESSA allows states a lot of leeway about how and what accountability system they use. There is no need to worry about some imperial federal power invading Pennsylvania to force our hand with standardized testing. We should call their bluff on this. I’ll bet that if we did so, many other states would do the same.
Standardized testing is another failed education policy. Our legislators would do good to read this report and make up their own minds about it.
Though a few years and disasters have happened since its publication, it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten by the very people who ordered it to be written in the first place.
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Year after year, decade after decade, the poor and people of color get fewer school resources, larger class sizes, narrowed curriculum and lower acceptance to colleges.
Yet, as defenders of standardized testing (and racist practices in general) love to point out, not all minorities consistently fail these tests.
In particular, Asian-Americans – taken as a whole – score better than white Americans.
So the tests are totally fair, right? Case closed?
Wrong.
Asian-Americans, who make up roughly 5 percent of public school enrollment nationally, are just as much victimized by standardized testing as any other minority. The only difference is their success is held up as an excuse for upholding this deeply inequitable practice.
It’s kind of like if two people were pitted against each other in a race, and one had to run a mile, and the other had to run 1.5 miles – and the second person actually won. Would that make the race fair?
No. Not at all. But the organizers point to the result as proof that running that extra distance in the same amount of time was nondiscriminatory. So stop complaining!
Take the SAT. Asian-American students typically score higher than other students on America’s most popular college gatekeeper as they do on other standardized tests. For instance, among high school students who graduated in 2020, Asian students scored an average of 632 on the SAT math section, compared with 547 for white students. The average math score overall was 523 (out of 800).
What does this really mean?
ASIAN AMERICANS ARE NOT A MONOLITH
First of all, when we talk about Asian-American students doing well on standardized tests, we’re generalizing. We don’t mean all Asians – only a certain percentage of certain kinds of these people. After all, Asia is a pretty big continent.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are roughly 23 million Americans of Asian descent, and the largest subgroups are people of Chinese and Indian ancestry with populations of approximately 5 million each. Next comes people of Filipino (4.2 million), Vietnamese (2.2 million), Korean (1.9 million) and Japanese descent (1.5 million).
But those are just the biggest subgroups. When you add in all Asian-Americans including Pacific Islanders, you get more than 50 different ethnic groups with varying languages, immigration histories and educational experiences.
Any generalization about such a diverse group will leave out important details, including test scores.
ALL ASIANS DON’T GET HIGH TEST SCORES
For example, high test achievement is not something attained universally by all people who can trace their parentage through that part of the world. It’s actually much more common for East Asians than others. In particular, we’re talking about people of Chinese, Korean and similar heritages.
In these countries, college admission often is decided on a single high-stakes test – the gaokao in China or the suneung in South Korea. People whose cultures trace back to these parts of the world are used to engaging in intense test prep as a regular feature of teenage life. So many Asian immigrant parents with ties to these countries often see the SAT or ACT as the equivalent of Asia’s admissions tests and thus engage in test prep as a matter of course, regardless of cost or effort.
This goes far in explaining why Chinese- and Korean-Americans have the highest rate of participation in SAT/ACT test prep – even more than people from other Asian ethnicities.
In one study, more than half of Korean-Americans and 42 percent of Chinese-Americans took an SAT prep course before college compared to 35.6 percent of white students, 32.4 percent of Hispanic students and 40.4 percent of black students. This is true regardless of household income. Affluent Asian Americans were more likely to take test prep, but 46.7 percent of low-income Korean-Americans still took a prep course.
East Asian-Americans show statistically significant gains from test prep much more often than others. This is partially due to having better access to adequately funded K-12 schools than other minority groups. They are less likely to attend racially segregated, poorly resourced schools, unlike their Black and Hispanic peers. Even Asians from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to get more out of test prep than others because they are more likely to attend well-resourced schools than their counterparts in the same socio-economic bracket.
And let’s not forget that test prep companies target Asian-American communities. You’ll find them in urban centers like Koreatown in Los Angeles or heavily Asian suburbs such as the San Gabriel Valley. Advertising material for these services are often in multiple languages or displayed in Asian-language newspapers and ethnic media.
Most of New York City’s 411 prep centers are based in Queens and Brooklyn, “with over a quarter of them… most notably in the boroughs’ Asian enclaves of Flushing and Sunset Park in Brooklyn,” The New York Times reported.
“On the opposite coast, 861 such tutoring centers exist in California’s Orange, Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, all heavy with Asian-American families,” the article states.
So it’s no wonder why certain Asian-American communities – especially East Asian communities – tend to favor test prep and achieve high standardized test scores.
ASIANS ARE HELD TO UNFAIR STANDARDS
But let us not forget that East Asians are not ALL ASIANS. If you’re unlucky enough to be from other parts of that massive continent or the island chains of the Pacific, the US will still paint you with the same broad brush.
All Asian-Americans – whether of East Asian descent or not – are held to a higher standard in things like college admissions where overachievement is considered the norm and little else is tolerated.
This is unfair to East Asians because it expects them to jump through more hoops than white people or other ethnic groups just to be accepted, but it is even worse for other Asian subgroups.
A 2022 study of the nine-campus University of California – the state with the country’s largest Asian-American population – concluded that Filipino, Thai, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Laotian students were admitted at below-average rates and that many ethnicities including Samoans and Chamorros, were underrepresented in the system.
Why? They had lower test scores than admissions officials expected.
Such an emphasis on standardized testing is not healthy for students of any nationality. The College Board makes millions of dollars every year with assessments like the SAT and ACT holding the scores up as proof that certain students have what it takes to excel in college or universities.
This is a rarely mentioned side effect of Asian-American’s standardized testing overachievement. And it may help to explain why – despite scoring well on standardized tests – Asians don’t complete college as often as students from other ethnicities.
According to an analysis of the 23-campus California State University System, all Asian subgroups were less likely than whites to complete their degrees in four years. There were roughly 78,000 Asians attending the university system in 2016, yet their four-year completion rate was 3% below that of all students. Only a few subgroups – Japanese and Asian Indians – had four-year completion rates that exceeded the average.
If test scores and admissions were all it took to achieve post secondary success, you’d expect college completion to be shared by Asian-Americans across the board.
In reality, college attainment varies significantly within the Asian community. While more than half of Japanese and Korean Americans (and nearly 3/4 of Asian Indian Americans) age 24 or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2019, the same was true for less than 1/5 of their Laotian, Hmong and Cambodian counterparts.
CONCLUSIONS
Therefore, it is highly suspect when standardized testing apologists point to Asian-American test scores as proof the system is fair and balanced.
First of all, it conflates the achievements of mostly East Asians with all Americans of eastern heritage. Second, it demands more of one minority group to be accepted as equal to a white majority.
In any case, the standardized testing industry can no longer hide behind the myth of the Asian-American model minority to justify their shady business practices.
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If you’ve stumbled across this article on social media, congratulations!
You’re one of the few people allowed to read it!
This blog, Gadfly on the Wall, used to be read by at least half a million people each year. Now it’s seen by barely 100,000.
The reason? Poor writing? Flagging interest in the subject?
I don’t think so.
Education is still as important today as it was in 2014 when I started this venture. And as to my writing ability, it’s no worse now than it was 8 years ago.
So this year, my blog had the fewest hits since I started – 124,984 in 2022. By comparison, last year I had 222,414.
I’d write an article, post it on social media and see it reposted again and again. You’d think that would mean it was popular, but no. The people who saw it liked it enough to suggest it to others, but it went little further. With each share, fewer people saw it. Like someone put up a wall in front of it.
In truth, I’m lucky as many people had the opportunity to read my work as did.
The question is where do I go from here?
Should I continue, knowing only a select few will get to hear me? Should I try paying the billionaire tech bros to let more readers in?
My work isn’t a product and no one is paying me to do it.
Oh well…
In any case, here’s a look back at my most popular articles from the year that was and one honorable mention:
Description: My school’s football team is mostly black. They played a mostly white football team and were greeted by racial slurs and an allegedly intentional injury to one of our players. However, the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) blamed both sides for the incident.
Fun Fact: It’s one of those decidedly local stories that community newspapers used to cover before almost all went bankrupt or were sold to the media giants. Having this platform allowed me to call out an injustice when most voices were silenced. The injured player’s mother thanked me for doing so. Stories like this keep me going.
Description: At the beginning of the summer, governments were so shaken by the exodus of teachers from the classroom that they were discussing raising our salaries or giving us bonuses. Parents were so adamantly against distance learning they demanding in-person classes with real, live human teachers. What a shock to the super elite education “experts” who had been pushing ways to eliminate teachers for decades and ignoring our consistent march out of the field under these conditions.
Description: Charter schools are inequitable because they have charters. These are special agreements that they don’t have to follow all the rules other authentic public schools funded by tax dollars must follow. That’s unfair and it applies to EVERY charter school because every one has a charter. Hence, the name.
Fun Fact: Criticism of charter schools in general usually degrades to defense of individual charter schools avoiding whatever general criticism is leveled against the industry. The argument in this article has the benefit of avoiding any such evasion. All charter schools are guilty of this (and many are guilty of much more). All of them.
Description: Just a list of many things classroom teachers know about schools and education but that the general public often ignores. These are the kinds of things missing from the education debate because we rarely include teachers in the discussion about the field where they are the experts.
Fun Fact: For a few hours people were talking about this article far and wide. And then – boom – it got shut down with a bang. This one was so universal it should have been popular for weeks. But it just disappeared.
Description: Charter schools are colonial enterprises. They loot and pillage the local tax base but without having to be governed by school boards made up of community members – otherwise known as local taxpayers. They can be run by appointed boards often made up of people who do not come from the community in question. They are outsiders come merely for personal profit. These invaders are quite literally taking local, community resources and liquidating them for their own use – the maximization of personal profit. The public is removed from the decision-making process about how its own resources are utilized and/or spent.
Fun Fact: It’s an argument from consistency. If we’re against the colonial enterprise, we must be against charter schools, too. I’m particularly proud of the graphic (above) I created to go with this article.
Description: Dr. Mark Holtzman, the Superintendent from the district where I live, left under strange circumstances. He resigned and took a new contract in a matter of hours so he could get a raise from a lame duck school board without having to wait for the people the community elected to decide the matter to take office first. Then when it all came to light, he left the district for greener pastures.
Fun Fact: More than any other news source, I documented what happened in detail. Without a series of articles I wrote on this, most people would have had very little idea what happened. It would have just been rumors. This is why we need local journalism. It shouldn’t be left to bloggers like me.
Description: This was social media’s latest crackdown on edu-bloggers and other truth tellers. I used to get 1,000 readers a week. Now I’m lucky to get a few hundred. There’s a strict algorithm that determines what people get to see on their Facebook pages. And if it says you’re invisible, then POOF! You’re gone and the people who would most enjoy your writing and want to pass it on don’t get the chance. It’s undemocratic in the extreme but totally legal because Facebook is a for-profit company, not a public service. Money wins over free exchange of ideas.
Fun Fact: There used to be so many other education bloggers like me out there. Now there are just a handful. This is why.
Description: Standardized tests were supposed to improve our public schools. They were supposed to ensure all students were getting the proper resources. They were supposed to ensure all teachers were doing their best for their students. But after more than four decades, these assessments have not fulfilled a single one of these promises. In fact, all they’ve done is make things worse at public schools while creating a lucrative market for testing companies and school privatization concerns.
Fun Fact: Pundits still talk about standardized testing as if it were innovative. It’s not. It’s the status quo. Time to end this failed experiment.
Description: Let’s examine some charter school propaganda – one piece at a time – and see if there’s any truth to these marketing claims. Charter schools are actually not public schools in the same way as other taxpayer funded schools. They do not save money – they waste it. Their students do not outperform authentic public school students. They are not innovative – they are regressive. They do not protect children’s civil rights – they violate them.
Fun Fact: I designed the title and picture to trick readers into thinking this was a pro-charter school article. So many people were butt hurt when they read it! I just hope it helped clarify the matter to those who were undecided.
Description: The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test is an assessment made by Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a so-called non-profit organization out of Portland, Oregon. Some states require the MAP as part of their standardized testing machinery. However, in my home state of Pennsylvania, the MAP is used as a pre-test or practice assessment by districts that elect to pay for it. What a waste! Why do we need a test BEFORE the test? The assessment’s job is to show how our students are doing in Reading, Math and Science compared with an average test taker. How does that help? I don’t teach average test takers. I teach human beings. Students learn at their own rates – sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We don’t quicken the timescale with needless comparisons.
Fun Fact: I think this article was as popular as it was because people could relate. So many teachers told me how relieved they were to hear someone else expressing all the frustrations they were experiencing in their own districts with the MAP and other tests like it. If administrators and school boards would just listen to teachers! If they’d even bother asking them!
Description: When it comes to dumb ideas that just won’t go away, there is a special place in the underworld for the demand that teachers post their learning objectives prominently in the classroom. It presupposes that teachers control everything their students learn in the classroom and can offer it to them on a silver platter. It’s not just a useless waste of time but a dangerous misunderstanding of what actually happens in the learning process.
Fun Fact: This isn’t exactly news, but teachers were relieved to hear their truth finally given voice. So many of us still have to abide by this nonsense when we could be doing something that actually makes a difference. It’s nice to have your sanity and frustration confirmed. If only administrators could admit they were wrong and stop demanding this crap!
Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups
This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began my blog in 2014:
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This almost always concludes with two types of plan.
First, there is the serious venture made up of things like increasing spending to meet student need, wraparound services, early intervention, reducing class size, redistributive justice and cultural competence – a plan that looks the reality in the face and makes bold attempts to come to terms with it.
Then there is the cheap knockoff proposition – a buzzword-laden scheme where someone is trying to convince you their half hearted proposal is actually a solution to the very real problem of educational inequality.
And the number one thing you can use to tell the difference between the two is this – standardized test scores.
The first plan that is centered around actually fixing disparities makes no mention of test scores – or at least relegates them to obstacles. The second is built all around them – as an essential component of the overall scheme.
This is because the second feel-good-accomplish-nothing plan is essentially performative.
Therefore, it is constructed around standardized test scores as a metric of success.
Planners think: We’re going to do A, B and C to make our schools more equitable. And how will we know we’re doing it right? We’ll use our standardized test scores!
And anyone who understands the history of these types of assessments and how they still work will know that this mirage is built at the cost of genuine equity.
So constructing your plan to fix this problem around one of its root causes is like claiming you can fix a sinking ship by drilling more holes in its hull.
At best, it’s naive. At worst, it’s self-defeating and disingenuous.
Both types of assessment are supposed to measure what students have learned. But not all learning is equal.
For example, a beginning chef needs to know how to use the stove, have good knife skills and how to chop an onion. But if you give her a standardized test, it instead might focus on how to make foie gras – something that would only come in handy at a high end French restaurant.
The fact of the matter is that standardized tests do NOT necessarily focus on the most important aspects of a given task. They focus on obscurities – things that most students don’t know.
This is implicit in the design of these exams and is very different from the kinds of tests designed by classroom teachers.
When a teacher makes a test for her students, she’s focused on the individuals in her classes. She asks primarily about the most essential aspects of the subject and in such a way that her students will best understand. There may be a few obscure questions, but the focus is on whether the test takers have learned the material or not.
When psychometricians design a standardized test, on the other hand, they aren’t centered on the student. They aren’t trying to find out if the test taker knows the most important facts or has the most essential skills in each field. Instead, there is a tendency to eliminate the most important test questions so that the test – not the student – will be better equipped to make comparisons between students based on a small set of questions. After all, a standardize test isn’t designed for a few classes – it is one size fits all.
New questions are field tested. They are placed randomly on an active test but don’t count toward the final score. Test takers aren’t told which questions they’ll be graded on and which are just practice questions being tried out on students for the first time. So students presumably give their best effort to both types. Then when the test is scored, the results of the field test questions determine if they’ll be used again as graded questions on a subsequent test.
If 40 to 60 percent of test takers answer the question correctly, it might make it onto the test. But questions that are answered correctly by 80 percent or more of test takers are usually jettisoned.
“As a consequence of the quest for score variance in a standardized achievement test, items on which students perform well are often excluded. However, items on which students perform well often cover the content that, because of its importance, teachers stress. Thus, the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills.”
If we are guided in large part by standardized test scores, we aren’t guided by authentic learning. We’re guided by a false picture of learning. Therefore, the most effective way – perhaps the only practical way – of raising test scores is to teach directly to a specific test. And not only the test, but the specific version of the test being given that year.
So if we do somehow manage to raise test scores, we haven’t improved academics at all but a mere semblance of it. And thus the equity we might celebrate in such a situation would be just as false.
You got a good score on the MAP test. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean you know anything of real value except how to take this particular MAP test which, itself, will change after the next round of questions are field tested.
And if we insist on evaluating the equity of our schools on these test scores, we will only make things that much worse.
We end up chasing the psychometricians. We try to guess which aspects of a subject they think most students don’t know and then we teach our students that to the exclusion of more important information. And since what students don’t know changes, we end up having to change our instructional focus every few years based on the few bread crumbs surreptitiously left for us by the state and the testing corporations.
That is not a good way to teach someone anything. It’s like teaching your child how to ride a bike based on what the neighbor kid doesn’t know.
It’s an endless game of catch up that only benefits the testing industry because they cash in at every level. They get paid to give the tests, to grade the tests and when students fail, they get paid to sell us this year’s remediation material before kids take the test again, and – you guessed it – the testing companies get another check!
It’s a dangerous feedback loop, a cycle that promotes artificially prized snippets of knowledge over constructive wholes.
But we can no longer continue feeding that beast and pretending that we can somehow provide equity to our underserved children, too.
We have to choose – equity or testing. Fairness or unrestrained capitalism.
Do not believe anyone who tells you to support a plan built on both.
It does not exist.
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She was in her 90s and had been unwell since before COVID. But she was also our matriarch, the point around which so much of our interrelations orbited and met.
After the funeral, I found myself at my uncle’s house somehow tasked with watching over several young cousins who had had just about enough of sitting around quietly in itchy suits and dresses.
To get a moment to myself, I set them a task: go downstairs among the assorted relatives and ask them to tell you a story about Ce Ce. Best story wins.
They went off like an explosion. And when they came back, they each had a touching tale about Ce Ce.
One was about how she defended a niece who wanted to marry someone of another faith. Another story was a fond recollection of the sweet and sour spaghetti sauce she used to make, the recipe of which is lost forever.
I was even surprised to hear some stories I had never known like that after my grandfather died, a semi-famous painter had asked Ce Ce on a date!
When my little cousins’ recitations were done, they were united in one thing – wanting to know who won.
I stumbled. I stammered.
I really had no way of judging such a thing.
They had all brought back such wonderful stories. Who won? We were ALL enriched by hearing them.
And the results of these tests are used to make high stakes decisions about which classes the students can enroll in, which enrichments, field trips or remediation they require, and even how much funding will be given or withheld from the schools and districts where they attend.
What if we took classroom grades as seriously as we take standardized test scores?
What if we valued them MORE?
The world would be a very different place.
The entire narrative of failing students and failing schools would turn on its head. After all, graduation rates have steadily increased over the last decade.
Students are completing more courses and more difficult courses. And students are even getting higher grades in these classes!
The new analysis comes from the U.S. Department of Education, and tracks transcripts of a representative sample of high school graduates in 1990, 2000, 2009, and 2019.
It does not include scores from 2020 and 2022 when both classroom grades and national test scores fell. But that’s clearly because of the pandemic and the fact that most students educations and testing schedules were disrupted.
Before COVID, students increasingly were taking higher-level courses, and their Grade Point Averages (GPAs) were steadily rising — from an average of 2.68 in 1990 to 2.94 in 2000, 3.0 in 2009, and 3.11 in 2019.
This is true of students from all backgrounds, but disparities still existed. On average, white and Asian students had higher GPAs than Black and Hispanic students. Though girls, overall, had higher GPAs than boys.
However, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), given to a sample of students across the country, test scores during the same period did not show a similar increase. Math and reading scores in 2019 were slightly lower than in 2009 and unchanged from 2005. Science scores haven’t budged since 2009.
It doesn’t take much to show why classroom grades are better at assessing student learning. Compare them with standardized test scores.
Students earn grades based on a wide range of assessments, activities, and behaviors – quizzes, class participation, oral and written reports, group assignments, homework, and in-class work.
Standardized tests, on the other hand, are not assigned on such a multifaceted range of factors. Instead, they are designed to obtain a measure of student proficiency on a specified set of knowledge and skills within limited academic areas, such as mathematics or reading.
Classroom grades are tapestries sown from many patches showing a year’s worth of progress. Standardized tests are at best snapshots of a moment in time.
So the biggest difference isn’t a matter of validity, it is pragmatism. Test scores can be used to rate students from all over the country or the world. They can be used to sort kids into a hierarchy of best to worst. Though why anyone would want to do that is beyond me. The purpose of education is not like the National Football League (NFL). It’s to encourage learning, not competition based on a simulation of learning.
And there is evidence that classroom grades are more valid than standardized test scores.
Kids with perfect scores on the SAT or American College Testing (ACT) tests don’t achieve more than kids who received lower scores or never took the tests in the first place.
Researchers followed more than 123,000 students who attended universities that don’t require applicants to take these tests as a prerequisite for admission. They concluded that SAT and ACT test scores do not correlate with how well a student does in college.
However, classroom grades do have predictive value – especially when compared to standardized tests. Students with high grades in high school but middling test scores do better in college than students with higher test scores and lower grades.
Why? Because grades are based on something other than the ability to take one test. They demonstrate a daily commitment to work hard. They are based on 180 days (in Pennsylvania) of classroom endeavors, whereas standardized tests are based on the labor of an afternoon or a few days.
Classroom grades would not have such consistent predictive value if they were nothing but the result of grade inflation or lenient teachers.
In fact, of the two assessments – classroom grades and standardized tests – one is far more essential to the daily learning of students than the other.
We could abolish all standardized testing without any damage to student learning. In fact, the vacuum created by the loss of these high stakes tests would probably result in much less teaching to the test. Days, weeks, months of additional class time would suddenly appear and much more learning would probably take place.
Academic decisions about which classes students can enroll in or what remediation is necessary could just as easily be made based on classroom grades and teacher observations. And funding decisions for schools and districts could be made based on need and equity – not the political football of standardized testing.
However, getting rid of classroom grades would be much more disruptive. Parents and students would have few measures by which to determine if students had learned the material. Teachers would have fewer tools to encourage children to complete assignments. And if only test scores remained, the curriculum would narrow to a degree unheard of – constant, daily test prep with no engagement to ones life, critical thinking or creativity.
To be fair, there are mastery-based learning programs that try to do without grades, but they are much more experimental and require a complete shift in how we view learning. This is a more holistic system that requires students to demonstrate learning at one level before moving ahead to the next. However, it is incredibly labor intensive for teachers and often relies heavily on edtech solutions to make it viable.
I’m not saying this is an impossible system or even taking a stance on its value. But a large scale shift away from classroom grades would be chaotic, confusing and probably a failure without serious support, scaffolding and parental, teacher and student buy-in.
At the end of the day, classroom grades are the best tool we have to determine whether learning has taken place and to what degree. We should do everything we can to change the way policymakers prefer the standardized approach to the personalized one.
‘It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Thus, the urge to quantify student learning seems predicated on the popular maxim: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Classroom grades are actually concerned with the project at hand – assessment of learning.
Which brings me back to my little cousins.
When I told them I couldn’t possibly pick a winner between them based on their stories, there were lots of groans of annoyance.
They viewed the whole project as a competition and they wanted to win.
I hope on reflection they’ll see that we all won.
Everything isn’t a contest. We are not all opponents.
If they can grasp that, it would be the greatest lesson I could teach.
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I’m a public school teacher in western Pennsylvania, and when I returned to school this week before classes started, I noticed my stapler was irreparably jammed from last year.
The secretary lead me to a closet full of brand new Swingline staplers.
I thanked her, took one back to my room and started stapling.
Three staples in, it was irreparably jammed.
When I returned home that evening and complained to my family about the woes of the day, my sweet 13-year-old daughter offered me a stapler we had around the house.
When I brought it to school, it worked like a dream.
It wasn’t some top of the line model. It was another basic Swingline stapler. It was slightly less boxy and more modern than the kind I got from the office. But it worked. That’s the important difference.
So why did the office have a closet full of faulty staplers?
Those staplers – that many staplers – probably add up to hundreds of dollars.
And they don’t even work!
Sadly, the full extent of the waste district-wide is much farther reaching than just the staplers.
Later that very day, teachers in my building were forced to sit through a virtual training on the MAP test.
This is an assessment made by Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a so-called non-profit organization out of Portland, Oregon.
The company claims its assessments are used by over 9,500 schools and districts in 145 countries – but none is more popular than the MAP.
Some states even require the MAP as part of their standardized testing machinery. However, in the Commonwealth, the MAP is used as a pre-test or practice assessment by districts that elect to pay for it.
My building – the middle school – used a variety of different assessments throughout the years for this purpose – IXL, CDT, etc.
My district had used the MAP consistently for years at the elementary schools, so someone in administration thought it made sense to bring it to the middle school now and eventually institute it in the high school, as well.
Do we really need an assessment BEFORE the state mandated assessments?
Heck no!
Classroom teachers give enough assignments and tests of their own to know where their students are academically throughout the year. We grade them after all. What do you think that’s based on – guessing?
But certain administrators just love these pre-tests. They love looking at spreadsheets of student data and comparing one grading period to another. They think if the numbers go higher, it will be proof they’re good principals and functionaries.
It’s pathetic to be honest. What a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be used for actual learning! What a waste of class time that could be used for actual teaching!
And what a negative impact these assessment actually have on students and their learning!
For instance, at the MAP training, teachers were told the assessment’s job was to show how our students were doing in Reading, Math and Science compared with an average test taker.
How is constantly comparing them to a norm going to help them improve?
If I went on a diet and stepped on the scale, learning that my weight loss wasn’t as high as an average dieter would not help me stay away from sweets. If anything, it would inspire me to go on a binge in the snack drawer.
When learning a skill, it doesn’t help to know how well others are or are not learning that same skill. It matters how much you are learning in comparison to yourself. Yesterday I knew THIS. Today I know a bit MORE. Who cares what the so-called average learner can do!?
But no matter how many times I say such things to administrators or paid trainers from NWEA, they just don’t get it.
At this training, the instructor actually wanted to know what “elevator speech” teachers were going to give to parents about why the MAP was important!
It’s bad enough we’re being forced to give this crappy assessment, but now you want us to spout propaganda to the very people paying our salaries!?
Having trusted teachers sooth community worry with corporate propaganda would be a big win for the testing company.
However, I’ll give the trainer one thing – she understood that the MAP assessment scores would not be useful unless students could be encouraged to take the test seriously. Nobody tries their best at something they think is unimportant.
Her solution was two-fold. First, NWEA has produced several propaganda videos to show students why the test is important.
Teachers are supposed to monitor all this on a screen and intervene when it occurs. We’re supposed to counsel kids not to just guess and then allow them back on the test. If the algorithm still thinks students are guessing, we’re supposed to suspend their test and make them take it all over again.
Teachers throughout the state have to take on-line classes every year about what we are and are not allowed to do during the PSSA test. Stopping students who seem to be guessing, is not allowed. I’m not even allowed to point out if a student skipped a question on the test!
I certainly can’t scrap a PSSA test that I think a student didn’t give his best effort on and make him do it again!
So how exactly is this MAP test a practice for the real thing!?
Even under the best of circumstances, it’s an artificial environment where scores are massaged to give an unrealistic picture of how students will do on the PSSA.
Of course, administration at my school has one more trick up its sleeve to get students to take the MAP test seriously.
These people are making lots of money off this standardized testing baloney!
According to a 2015 brochure from NWEA about the MAP test, it costs $13.50 per student to take the test every year. And that’s just for the Reading and Math. It costs an additional $2.50 per pupil for the Science test.
So if we estimate 1000 students at the elementary and middle school level, that’s roughly $16,000 a year to take the test.
And that doesn’t include the price of trainings like the one I had to sit through this week.
According to that same brochure, the cost for a single days training is $4,000, though sometimes it can be reduced to $3,500 if you buy the right package.
Trainings can go up to $40,000 for multiple days and an in-person trainer.
I wonder how much money my district flushed down the toilet on this garbage.
We need a test of basic decency for decision makers.
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To answer that question, we have to understand how we got here in the first place – where these kinds of assessments came from in the US and how they became the guiding policy of our public schools.
From the very start, it had serious consequences for public policy. The results were used to rationalize the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool.
However, Brigham’s greatest claim to fame was the creation of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. These tests were not central to school curriculum and mainly used as gatekeepers with the SAT in particular still in wide use today.
The problem then – as now – is that standardized tests aren’t very good assessments. They work okay for really simple things like rudimentary math. However, the more complex a skill you’re assessing, the more inadequate the tests. For example, imagine just trying to have a conversation with someone where your only choices of reply were limited to four canned responses. That’s a multiple-choice assessment. The result is a testing system that selects against the poor and minorities. At best, it reproduces the economic and racial disparities of society. At worst, it ensures those disparities will continue into the next generation.
That isn’t to say the system went unchallenged. By the 1960s, the junk science and leaps of logic behind standardized testing were obvious and people began fighting back in court. Black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry.
Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middleclass group.
So in the 1980s, the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk,” a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing. Thus, the authors argued we needed standardized testing to make American children competitive in a global marketplace.
For instance, it concluded that average student test scores had decreased but didn’t take into account that scores had actually increased in every demographic group. It compared two decades worth of test scores, but failed to mention that more students took the test at the end of that period than at the beginning, and many of the newer students were disadvantaged. In other words, it compared test scores between an unrepresentative group at the beginning of the comparison with a more representative group at the end and concluded that these oranges were nothing like the apples they started with. Well, duh.
Most people weren’t convinced by the disaster capitalism at work here, but the report marks a significant moment in the standardization movement. In fact, this is really where our modern era began.
It took an additional two decades, until 2001, for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to require standardized testing in ALL public schools.
With bipartisan support, Bush tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress. And from then on, the die was cast. This policy has been upheld through both Republican and Democratic regimes.
From the 1980s to 2022 we’ve had wide scale standardized testing in our schools. That’s roughly 40 years where the entirety of what is done in public school has been organized around these assessments. They drive the curriculum and are the ultimate benchmark by which success or failure is judged. If this policy was ever going to work, it would have done so by now.
However, it has achieved NONE of its stated goals.
NCLB specifically stated that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That has not happened. Despite spending billions of dollars on remediation and completely reorganizing our schools around the assessments, test scores have remained mostly static or even decreased.
NCLB also championed the idea that competing for test scores would result in better teachers. However, that didn’t happen either. Instead, educators were forced to narrow the curriculum to cover mostly what was assessed, reduce creativity and critical thinking, and teachers who served poor and minority students were even punished for doing so.
If the purpose of standardized testing was all the things the law purported, then it was a decades long failure. It is the policy equivalent of slamming your head into a wall repeatedly and wondering why you aren’t moving forward. (And where did this headache come from?)
If, however, the purpose of standardized testing was to fulfill Friedman’s privatization dreams, then it was a resounding success. Public schools still persist, but they have been drained, weakened and in many ways subverted.
Look at the evidence.
Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.
Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam.
But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives.
Chief among these was charter schools.
The first charter school law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota. It allowed for the creation of new schools that would have special agreements (or charters) with states or districts to run without having to abide by all the usual regulations. Thus, the school could go without an elected board, pocket public money as private profit, etc. The bill was quickly copied and spread to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
However, charter schools are rife with fraud and malfeasance. For instance, more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education. It’s a get rich quick scheme. And since these types of schools are free from the kinds of regulations, democratic governance and/or transparency that keeps authentic public schools in check, another charter school scandal pops up almost every day.
But let’s not forget school vouchers. Before high stakes testing, the idea of using public money to pay for private or parochial schools was widely considered unconstitutional. Now about 4% of US students go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers. This is an option in 32 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 600,000 students participated in a voucher, scholarship tax credit or education savings account program last school year, according to EdChoice, a pro-voucher and school choice group.
In short, they’re subsidies for wealthier kids at the expense of the middle class and disadvantaged.
Without standardized testing, it is impossible to imagine such an increase in privatization.
High stakes testing is a Trojan horse. It is a way to secretly undermine and weaken public schools so that testing corporations, charter schools and voucher schools can thrive.
Judged by its own metrics of success, standardized testing is an abject failure. Judged by the metric of business and school privatization it is a rousing success.
And that’s why it has been so hard to discontinue.
This is corporate welfare at its finest, and the people getting rich off our tax dollars won’t allow us to turn off the flow of funding without a fight.
On the right, policymakers are often boldly honest about their goals to bolster privatization over public schools. On the left, policymakers still cling to the failed measures of success testing has not been able to meet time-and-again.
However, both groups support the same system. They only give different reasons.
It is past time to wake up and smell the flowers.
If we want to ensure education dollars go to education and not profiteers, we need to end standardized testing.
If we want to help students learn to the best of their abilities, we need to stop gaslighting them with faulty measures of success or failure.
If we want to allow teachers to do the best for their students, we need to stop holding them back with antiquated eugenicist shackles.
And if we truly want to save our public school system, we have to stop propping up privatization.
In short, we need to end standardized testing.
The sooner, the better.
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People often ask me what I’d change about education if I could change just one thing.
But they don’t seem to realize that our schools are kind of like Jenga – if you change one thing, you might set off a chain reaction and it all comes tumbling down.
Change one thing – the RIGHT thing – and you may change all of them.
Maybe even for the better!
Why worry about that now?
Monday is my birthday. I’ll be 48.
Old enough to know that birthday wishes don’t come true. Unless maybe you wish for cake and ice cream.
But I can still see myself staring into the candles as friends and family sing the obligatory tune.
The orange flames wave back and forth atop tiny wax fingers threatening to burn down the whole chocolatey confection.
But before they do, I just might give in and make a wish – a birthday wish – and….
No more assessments where a multiplicity of nonacademic factors like parental income, childhood trauma and corporate bias are hidden behind a numeric label.
Educators would no longer be seen as overpaid babysitters but trusted pillars of the community.
They’d be respected – their opinions sought after in educational issues like diamonds.
And the pay! No longer would any teacher need to work more than one job! They’d be compensated like professional athletes. Maybe there’d even be a draft in each state where the most promising prospects out of college would be fought over by schools with children who they think would best be served by their hire.
Imagine a country like that! One that put children first by putting education first!
Imagine how it would change the landscape. Adults who grew up in such a system would be pretty hard to fool because they’d be critical thinkers.
No political charlatan could come in and bamboozle them with nonsense and charisma. No corporation could trick them into pyramid schemes and tax evasion.
No lack of social services, public healthcare, public goods!
Ah! It would be a much better world I think if my wish came true.
But…
Oh…
Sigh!
I don’t see it happening.
No even a little of it.
After two decades in the classroom, the wind always seems to be blowing against such things.
But then again, I have a chance to change the wind come Monday.
We all do.
If you’ll help me blow out the candles.
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Students as young as Kindergarten (and sometimes younger) are asked to read a text aloud in a given time and each mispronunciation is recorded and marked against them.
To my knowledge none are actually used on the DIBELS test but they give you an idea of what an adult version might be like if given to people our age and not just the littles.
Can you imagine being a child, feeling the pressure of a test and being presented with something that looked like those passages!?
The fear! The sense of urgency to say something before the time runs out! The feeling of inadequacy and confusion as you finished knowing you got it wrong!
Today I was forced to leave my class of 8th grade students with a sub so an “expert”from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit could lecture me and the rest of my school’s English department in using DIBELS as a gatekeeper assessment for all students.
That way we can group the students more easily based on their reading deficiencies.
I literally had to stop teaching for THAT.
I was bopping around the classroom, reading students’ writing, helping them organize it, helping them fix their explanations and craft sophisticated essays on a short story.
And the rest of the department with similar experience and education. In the group was also the holder of a doctorate in education. Almost all of us at least held a masters degree.
However, you’d need a classroom teacher to explain that to you. And these are more business types. Administrators and number crunchers who may have stood in front of a classroom a long time ago but escaped at the first opportunity.
They look at a class full of students and don’t see human children. They see numbers, data.
Unfortunately there’s a whole world of reality up here above ground that they’re ignoring. And up here continuing with their willful fantasy is doing real harm.
When I look at my classes of students, I don’t see overwhelming academic deficiencies.
Even their test scores don’t justify that myth.
According to the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA), they’re pretty much where I’d expect them any other year.
My students are desperate for attention – any kind of attention – and will do almost anything to get it.
They’d prefer to be respected, but they don’t understand how to treat each other respectfully. So they aim for any kind of response.
To a large extent this is due to a disruption in the social and emotional development they would have received at school. But robbed of good role models and adequate consequences, they’re somewhat at sea.
We have to recognize the reality teachers, students and parents are living through.
And we have to make decisions based on that reality, not the same old preconceptions that have never gotten us anywhere.
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It’s as if they’re starving to learn something, and this play is nourishing their hearts and minds.
I laugh because my first thought was to come down on the shouting out and side commenting until a deeper part of me realized this was all okay. They were on-task, if unrestrained.
Comprehension is not a race. There is no one ahead or behind. Everyone goes at their own pace. And if you try to force someone to go more quickly than is best for them, they’ll stumble and fall.
But let’s be honest, these learning loss champions are not really worried about children. They’re representatives of the standardized testing industry.
So as the school year rapidly comes to a close, I have a suggestion to make.
I know I’m not qualified to do so.
I’m just a public school teacher with 17 years experience. I’ve never sat on any think tank boards. No testing corporation has ever paid me a dime to hawk one of their high quality remediation products.
I know that’s controversial, but I believe it to be true.
As such, they need down time.
They need time to regroup and recharge.
This pandemic has been hard on everyone.
As of April 1, nearly 3.47 million children have tested positive for COVID-19, most with mild symptoms, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A few hundred have died, mostly children of color. Many more kids probably contracted the virus but were asymptomatic spreaders of the disease to adults.
As a result, between 37,000 and 43,000 children in the United States have lost at least one parent to COVID-19, according to USC research.
They have suffered through changes in routine, disruptions in learning, breaks in the continuity of their healthcare, missed significant life events like birthday parties, vacations and graduations. But worst of all they have suffered the loss of safety and security.
We should not be demanding they work harder at a time like this.
We should be providing them with kindness, empathy and love.
In the classroom, I no longer have a thing called “Late Work.”
If a student hands in an assignment passed the due date, there is no penalty. I just grade it. And if it isn’t done correctly, I give them a chance to redo it.
As many chances as they need.
I remediate. I tutor. I offer advice, counseling, a sympathetic ear.
It’s not that much different than any other year, except in how often children need it now.
Kids AND their parents.
I can’t tell you how many adults I’ve counseled in the last several months.
So when the last day of school arrives, I will close my books.
There will be no assignments over the summer from me.
No homework. No requirements. No demands.
The best things kids can do is go out and play.
Have fun.
Recharge.
The corporate testing drones will tell you that’s a waste of time. Our kids are getting behind doing things like that.
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