Pain in the Test
Parents loathe state exams; now I know why
ANOTHER year, another ridiculous effort to see how schools are faring by using state tests, then negating the usefulness of those tests by waiting months to release scores and ultimately disregarding the scores and passing kids on to the next grade anyway.
It’s a system only a government bureaucrat could love.
The two statewide tests in English Language Arts and math begin in third grade. The math test is fairly straightforward and so gets much less criticism, although the usefulness of the actual test is debatable. But the ELA has come to represent everything that is wrong with New York’s entire education system.
The ELA state test for thirdgraders consists of six short essays and one long essay. That’s essentially a full day of writing for an 8-year-old, something that adults would find difficult. It’s a test of endurance more than reading proficiency.
At Chalkbeat, a teacher named Vivett Dukes noted, “My students simply didn’t have the stamina to read 7-8 new passages and write about them for hours on end. It felt crammed and by the third or fourth passage and writing combo, many students were becoming frazzled and fizzled out.”
Setting aside the test itself, the very system of the state tests makes no sense. The tests are administered in April yet the results aren’t provided until summer.
This year, the test results were delayed until late September. If a child is found to be deficient in English or math, wouldn’t it be reasonable to get them the results before the summer so that they can get extra help over the summer, perhaps attending summer school, and hope to improve?
Once they’re already on to the next grade, what difference do their scores make?
In fact, only one in 20 students in grades 3-8 attended summer school this past year. The schools have not improved, so what’s going on? As The Post explained in July: “In all, mandatory summer-school assignments are down by half over 2013, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s last year. And the trend is clear, dropping each year since de Blasio took over — when it had been rising under Bloomberg, peaking at 10 percent (32,205) in 2013.”
They set standards with the tests, only to ignore them. What’s the point?
Parents can opt out of the tests, but then they — and the schools — don’t get a chance to see how their kids compare with the other children in their school and across the state.
My oldest child is in third grade and is just hitting testing age this year, but my opposition to the test isn’t personal. By a quirk of fate, and literally hitting a lottery, she attends one of New York City’s rare public K-12 schools.
None of these state exams matter much for the individual children — as they don’t have to ever apply to middle school or high school if they don’t want to. But the schools still require them to take the test to make sure the students are meeting the state standards.
Educators are widely known not to be fans of the test either. An ELA 6-12 teacher, who has proctored the exams many times, told me, “The only people who benefit from the current test structure are the testing companies.”
She adds: “I read some of the test questions, and I’m, as an adult, not sure of what answer they’re looking for. Some of the readings are dreadful.”
There’s such a wide gulf between schools in the city that the test exposes, but it doesn’t get fixed.
“Students in failing schools are expected to do the same [on this test] as those in good schools. We should use the resources spent on the test to help these schools,” the ELA teacher told me.
Having standards in schools is important, but giving students an impossibly difficult, timeconsuming exam once a year, and then not using the results to help them, isn’t the way to implement those standards.
The ELA test needs to be reworked so that it actually helps the schools and students. They deserve better.