WHEN TESTING TRUMPS TEACHING, STUDENTS SUFFER
In August, the nightmares start.
Every teacher experiences the excitement, worry and sometimes dread as the first day of school approaches. It’s a combination of Christmas Eve and April 14.
Like most teachers, I spent the majority of my summer carefully crafting lesson plans. I spent weeks reading new books to add to my course and worked particularly hard on creating a week’s worth of team building activities to start the year by building a positive classroom environment.
Then, at the second day of professional development (before the students even arrived), I was handed the eight-page district assessment calendar.
Within the first 13 days of school, I was expected to administer three different mandated assessments. So there went the classroom contract for behavior, there went the applications for class jobs, there went the classroom scavenger hunt. Instead of spending those first few weeks getting to know my students’ names, interests and personalities, I was forced to hand them test after test, slowly chipping away at the positive atmosphere I wanted so badly to cultivate.
This year, I have to subject my eighth-grade students to 6,600 minutes of district-mandated testing. That’s 110 hours. That’s nearly 16 entire seven-hour school days.
Eighth-grade students in Hartford Public Schools are required to take 25 mandated
district and statewide assessments between late August and early June. Thirteen percent of the entire school year is dedicated to administering these “high-stakes tests.”
That means sacrifices have to be made when it comes to what is taught in the classroom. Teachers have to make the hard decisions to stop reading a book midway to pause for district testing, leaving Odysseus trapped on the island or Tom Robinson waiting for trial. Teachers have to make the choice to discourage extra questions from curious students in order to “cover the material” before the assessment date because personal inquires are not standardized. Teachers have to make these decisions to give up authentic
learning opportunities, like guest speakers, lively classroom conversations or individualized projects because they are not standardly assessed.
One could argue that all of this testing leads to data that could drive instruction, that could inform teaching, that could allow for innovative and creative responses to student needs. However, over-testing students waters down the tests’ effectiveness, usefulness, and integrity.
But what are the actual results of the tests? Are truancy or disengagement rates down? Are Hartford students getting accepted to colleges at higher rates? Are these tests correlative to students’ success after high school? No. Absolutely not.
However, some results are clear. Students are, in large numbers, experiencing test fatigue, anxiety, disengagement, detachment, and apathy towards school. Over the past few years, the number of students diagnosed with anxiety disorders are only exasperated by the constant testing. Written into students’ IEPs (individual educational plans) are accommodations to give students prior warning of testing — however, with the excessive testing calendar, students are on constant high alert with mandated assessments taking place nearly every three weeks, giving them no alleviation from their heightened anxiety.
Anxiety manifests itself in many forms in the classroom, ranging from sleeping, to pacing, to crying to panic attacks. And as teachers, one of our moral and professional responsibilities is to support our students in whichever way their anxiety appears. Yet, with constant testing, there are only so many “breaks from class,” cool-down stations and breathing exercises we can offer that actually help our students.
Could it be that by constantly testing students we are actually preventing them from gaining crucial life skills such as problem solving, collaboration and experiential learning?
Yet, teachers are rarely included in the decision process when it comes to education and even less likely to be included in conversations about assessments. Although Hartford allowed teachers to participate in the creation of some of the district-mandated results, they were not consulted in the frequency nor timing of any of the assessments.
As a professional, I feel that it undervalues my expertise to be excluded from these decisions. I cannot imagine how disempowering it must feel for the students, the victims of a system that commits so much time to testing over learning.