Sunday, February 3, 2008

They say that our campus is not a test-focused campus. That we don’t teach to the test. They say all this stuff, but we know that when they took a look at the children’s benchmarks, they’re worried as hell. I wasn’t worried until now. It’s not so much the thought of kids not passing the test that scares me, but the thought that it’s so high-stakes that a kid can’t move on to the next grade level because they can’t pass the test.

Shoot. In all honesty, some of these kids should not even be in this grade. The teachers who must administer all this testing wonder: How? Just how in the world did some of these kids get this far without anyone ever noticing, anyone ever attempting to intervene and provide some sort of decent remediation? We can’t play the catch-up game now that they’re in third grade! I’m not talking about the kids that failed their benchmarks, no, I’m talking about the students who read on a Kindergarten/First grade level, the ones that scored in the twenties and BELOW on their benchmarks. In order to score that low, you must be purposely choosing the incorrect answer because statistically, one who randomly guesses on a 4-choice bubble test has a chance of scoring higher than that. I’m serious. Passing or failing a test doesn’t say everything about a kid, but to fail it with a score below 30%? That tells you SOME thing.

In the beginning of the school year, I had 4 students reading on a first grade level. Now I think they are about mid-second grade level. But I know other third grade teachers with students who are still on Kindergarten/First grade reading. In one month we’ll be taking the reading test.

When I was in college I heard about all this stuff about tests that go on in school, but is the reality ever grim now that I’m a teacher.

Why does it keep getting worse? Just when I thought, “hey, I’ve got this, it’s all right now—“ then test-taking mode hits.

I hate that I have to give up an hour of my day every day to teach kids how to take a fucking test. As much as I dislike teaching science, I’d rather be teaching science instead of having to cut science in half, and practically cut out all of social studies.

We’ve always had the best rankings as far as test scores go on our campus, except for one year when we were “average”. I don’t care about the rankings, but I know that we’re going to haul ass to have to keep it up.


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