I have come to the realization that I miss work. The chaos, the noise, the kids - all of it. Except this week.
This is the week during which all juniors in the state of Michigan take standardize tests to prove that their teachers are worthy of holding down a job. I always hate testing week. First of all, thanks to the pressure of NCLB and the parasitic charter schools, I spend the whole month of February doing intensive test prep - during class time. Because juniors will take the ACT tomorrow, I spend an inordinate amount of time drilling them on grammar rules that we have gradually reviewed all year. We also perform timed reading tasks. By the time we actually get to test week, everyone is stressed and anxious.
The two days of testing that follow the ACT (yes, there are three day of testing - for a grand total of 12 hours), students will take state one test that cover some of the same material, but at a lower skill level. This test is called Work Keys and it seems to be geared toward entry level job skills. The final test students take is a social studies test that requires two essays in three hours.
To accommodate all of this testing, my district runs half days, keeping non-testing students at home. At the end of it, everyone is spent and drained. And for what? To tell me that my immigrant students don't test as well as their suburban counterparts? To try and drive a stake in my heart and make me feel like I'm a failure? To get more kids to go to privately operated charter schools, circumventing teachers' unions?
If students from lower socio-economic neighborhoods tend to do drastically poorer on tests - doesn't it stand to reason that poverty is an underlying cause? Maybe we should address the larger issue.
2 comments:
Of course you're right.
The whole situation with testing is out of control. I have a friend who left education. In her last semester teaching in a school district with a VERY poor population that was in danger of having it's state certification yanked, she (an English teacher) was instructed that she would only be teaching math to her classes for the weeks leading up to the tests. Because although the english scores weren't good the math scores were terrible.
NCLB only counts reading and math scores against (or for) a school. I know for a fact (based on report cards) that some of the charter schools in our area were not teaching social studies, in order to focus solely on math and reading.
I mean, why should children new to America be able to identify George Washington or any of the 50 states on a map?
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