Speakout Columns
Toxic testing
Apr 2, 2009 11:38 AM
Being on sabbatical has many benefits. Besides the wonderful opportunity to go back to college for a year, it’s a time for personal and professional reflection.
It’s amazing to sit in classes with teachers from all over New York City and hear many of the same sentiments expressed about feeling stifled, micromanaged, unheard and utterly frustrated. It’s also reassuring to hear that we still believe in the power of education to provide opportunity, create a lifelong love of learning and inspire the next generation of responsible and responsive global citizens.
Every day for us is a new chance to open minds and nurture dreams. We do this because we really think working with children is the most important work there is, second only to being a parent. Authentic and trusting relationships are what makes things happen when it comes to children, not the relentless collection of data.
Third grade seems to be one of the grades particularly hard hit by the recent emphasis on testing and assessment. There is no dispute that tests are necessary and useful to measure mastery and achievement, as well as to identify areas of academic deficits for appropriate support. However, when the emphasis on testing and data collection supersedes the mission and purpose of education, it compromises the integrity of the system and those who participate in it. This is what I call toxic testing.
When does testing become toxic? When:
- it continually interrupts the flow of academic instruction;
- it creates anxiety and frustration for students, teachers and parents;
- the results on one or two high-stakes tests become the predominant factor for promotion, marginalizing a teacher’s professional judgment regarding the child’s broader emotional, developmental and academic needs;
- the preparation for, the administration of, and the scoring of these tests requires the suspension of Academic Intervention Services for weeks at a time;
- the results are redundant or provide no new information for the teacher;
- all of the above.
Teachers use informal assessments daily, weekly, monthly to measure their students’ progress, collectively and individually. Information and soft data are gathered in the form of homework assignments, math and science quizzes, reading comprehension and vocabulary tests, conferring with students during writing, evaluation of projects and reports, observation of how children work independently and how much time they take to complete assignments, identifying fluency by hearing students read aloud, and using both verbal and written responses to evaluate comprehension and language skills.
Teachers all give tests — quizzes, chapter tests, unit tests, midterms and finals — to measure what students have learned, what they haven’t learned and what we need to reteach or teach differently.
The following is a list of mandated tests and assessments 3rd-graders were given last year in addition to what I’ve cited above:
- September/October ECLAS
- November ELA Predictive
- December Interim Assessments
- December Test preparation and practice for the January ELA.
- January NYS/ELA
- January/February Running Records
- February Test prep and practice for March CTB
- March CTB/Math
- April Interim Assessments
- April ECLAS
- May ELA and Math Predictive Assessments
As you can see, there’s at least one for every month. ECLAS testing for 3rd-graders in October generally doesn’t show significantly different results from the spring assessment in 2nd grade, the results of which 3rd-grade teachers have available.
ELA Predictive Assessments are supposed to predict how students will perform on the ELA in January. Generally this reinforces what we already know about our students. Why not use this time to simply teach them what we know they don’t know yet?
Running Records provide similar information to ECLAS in many cases and assume that children should be guided to very specific levels of independent reading material (A-Z) which are classified accordingly in classroom libraries. I think teachers are pretty tuned in to what level books their students can read and if needed can gently suggest something at a suitable readability level. We’ve always done that.
The final irony of all this is that the actual scores for the January ELA and the March CTB tests were not returned in time for end of the year class reorganization which begins in early June. Decisions about retention, placement, and summer school are made absent these results. When the magic numbers were finally “released” reorganization lists had to be reorganized according to Department of Education mandates and promotional cutoffs.
Teachers reading this will probably think: “Tell me something I don’t know.” It’s the public that needs to know what’s going on in our public schools and the DOE that needs to be a bit more reflective about the real impact of such excessive testing on our children. An educator once likened this to weighing a calf constantly but forgetting to feed it.
I’m not suggesting an end to testing. I am suggesting serious re-evaluation of what we’re doing with input from real teachers in real classrooms. Remember Albert Einstein’s words: “Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.”
Monica Weiss is a 3rd-grade teacher at PS 82, Queens. She has been a teacher for more than 20 years and is certified in both Common Branches and Special Education, and also has mentored new teachers and taught resource room.
