After assessing the situation in the hall, the covering administrator stepped into the breach. She stayed with the class for the rest of the morning, overseeing the completion of the day's test sections. At lunch I stopped by the office to see how she had made out. I found her sitting at the principal's desk, head in hands, visibly shaken. It looked as if she had been weeping. She didn't have to say anything. I knew what the matter was.
*
My feelings about high-stakes standardized testing have never been a secret. Administering them to students was part of my job description, and doing it made me feel morally compromised. Not having the courage to stand up for my principles, actually becoming a part of a system that was being used discredit myself and my colleagues by weaponizing data in an attempt to delegitimize public education while at the same time causing emotional trauma to children, made me feel powerless, guilty and complicit. (That's how systems like this are designed.) Refusing to allow my own children to be used by opting them out helped, but only a little.
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Here's an equation. See if you can guess what it represents:
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One year I was assigned to administer the NJASK to one of our classified students. He was a fourth grader at the time. His IEP stipulated he was to receive the test in a separate room, one-to-one, with all text and questions read aloud and all written responses scribed. I was chosen to be his test administrator. The LDTC was asked to vacate her room from 9:00 to 11:30, and it was there we set up shop. There were actually three of us in the room; myself, the student, and his imaginary friend who stayed under his desk and whom he would occasionally consult. This went on for an entire week. Although he answered only a handful of questions correctly (some by lucky guess), he was pretty smart. He knew he didn't know the answers, but he pretended to try and figure things out. As much as I encouraged him, and told him that he was putting forth a wonderful effort, I could tell that he knew that I knew that he didn't know much of what was on the test. I silently prayed he didn't feel he was embarrassing himself in front of me by his performance. We both did a good job pretending that what was really happening wasn't really happening. The only way I can describe the experience is to say it was truly surreal.
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Once when I was teaching third grade a kid threw up on his answer booklet. I had to stop the test administration and call the principal. The student went to the nurse. I continued testing and the principal filed an irregularity report. We had to put the vomited-on test booklet in a plastic baggie and send it back to the state. I'm not sure what they did with it. The student had to take a make-up.
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When New Jersey implemented its regimen of testing every single child every single year from grades 3 through 12, the test developed for use was called the NJASK (New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge). The summer before the test went "live" I sat for a week in a conference room at a hotel in Monroe with a bunch of other elementary school teachers from the state. Our job was to read through stacks of booklets containing student responses from the pilot version and, using that as a guide, set cut scores for proficiency. I was proud to have been selected for the task. It was an important job, and we took it very seriously. Towards the end of the week we provided our cut score numbers to the Department of Education and ETS overlords who had been monitoring our work. They told us to go back to the drawing board. Why? Because given our numbers, "Too many students would pass." It was then I realized that the entire exercise had been a farce. They could have just set the cut scores themselves. They were using us as cover. I protested, and refused to participate in re-setting the cut scores. After the work was finished, they asked for three volunteers to go before the state Board of Education and present the findings. I volunteered along with two others. Guess who didn't get picked to go.
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Remember that equation? Here's what it means:
The project of using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers has been discredited. We've known this for a long time. The sordid underside of testing industry's scoring practices has been exposed. We've known that for a long time too. For a teacher, the results come back too late to be actionable. And even if they didn't, they still wouldn't help, because if something was wrong I'd have little idea why. If there is value in using them to evaluate larger populations, then sampling would do the job just fine. It just isn't necessary to test every single child. To paraphrase Stephen Krashen, when you go to a doctor for a blood test, he doesn't take all your blood. To understand why it continues, follow the money. Billions of dollars have gone to line the pockets of test developers, curriculum and test-prep writers, publishers, and providers, computer software developers and tech companies tasked with bringing school wireless capacities and other technologies up to standardized testing requirements (and of course providing continuing tech support). This is all in addition to those school operators who profit from the corporatization of education when public schools are shut down. Thought experiment: If you had billions of dollars to spend on education, how would you spend it?
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When I found the central office administrator behind the principal's desk that long ago spring, I wanted to ask, "What did you think went on? How exactly did you think all that data got harvested?" But I didn't. She had witnessed something sad, disturbing, and frightening, and I felt bad for her. I guess it was her first time. All I offered was, "Well, now you know."
Unjust ill-conceived program leads to unjust ill-used data. Who could have guessed?
ReplyDeletePowerful stories & thinking. Thank you.