At this moment Stacey Garfinkle, who writes the On Parenting blog at the Washington Post, has started a conversation about testing with her post The Tests Are Coming!.
She writes:
Two weeks in a row, my son’s kindergarten class has been bumped from PE. When I asked why that was this past week, he said the older kids were practice testing in the gym.
And so, the No Child Left Behind testing stressors have begun.
Check out the discussion…. It’s a topic I’ve posted on before.
I was recently thinking evil, anti-NCLB, Baldridge thoughts when M. brought home her benchmarking binders. In it the students keep bar charts logging their progress and write their learning goals each quarter, which we as parents have to sign off on. True confessions time: I never got around to signing her binder and M., who was told that every student who turned it in right away would get candy as a reward, later told me that she had simply forged my initials and turned it in. While I’m more than less than thrilled at what she did, this is the place we have landed in terms of measuring student achievement and parent involvement. It feels like everyone is going through the motions, as opposed to real learning.
I contrast this with my memories of 5th grade. I had Mr. B., a newly minted male teacher (rather unusual) who was quite creative. I remember that in one corner of the room there was a carpeted area lined with shelves of books and that I spent a lot of time there reading, of all things, comic books about events in history. I remember that we had a class science fair and that someone made a large papier mache volcano that erupted, while I made a real telegraph with sheet metal, wires, a battery…the works. I remember being pulled out of class with three other classmates to work on set design for the big 5th grade play about the pioneers settling the West, which the students wrote. And I remember the entire back bulletin board being devoted to an outsize map of the United States. Each of us had to choose 2 states to research and I picked Texas and Maryland. I still remember struggling to draw the state flag of Maryland, never suspecting that I might live there someday, and filling in details about my state on the big map. Finally I remember in-school “mini-courses,” including one where I learned how to embroider. Nowhere in the class were the “objectives” posted. I certainly had never heard the word “rubric” or brief constructed response.
I wonder what M. will remember about school thirty years from now….
(One thing I hope she won’t have memories of is being harassed. I wore shorts under my skirts the entire year because a group of boys would flip up our skirts.)
Am I just missing something, or is there something truly rotten in Denmark? The testing madness now reaches all the way down into kindergarten, yet illiteracy is growing, and virtually every measure of achievement that pits us against the rest of the world says that we’re falling behind in almost every area. What is the real purpose of the hoops that children are being forced through and the stresses that they’re expected to endure? It certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to do with education. I’m so glad that my children grew up before this insanity took over.
The Washington state test is a joke from start to finish – the grading rubric for it is a mess and they’ve had to remove the Science portion from graduation requirements because it’s so screwed up. I have great memories of elementary school too. And I remember taking the CAT (CA achievement test) like 1-2 days in the late spring. No big deal, didn’t spend the year preparing for it, and it was a good measurement. I don’t understand why they had to reinvent the wheel with all these individual state tests.
Sad… In my district the test scores are fairly high. And in my 4th grade class, we build and erupt volcanoes, put on a whole Gold Rush play, and all that good stuff. I have a kid researching and building a mini-Stonehenge, on looking into what would happen if an earthquake hit NY, etc. … But the sad thing is that many schools with lower scores, they’re running scared and cutting out virtually everything but reading and math, and they “benchmark” test so much there’s not enough time left to teach. I detest the high-stakes testing that goes along with NCLB, along with the unreasonable expectations for English Language Learners and Special Ed students. Ridiculous.
Oh, I think one of the biggest crimes against education is the standardization NCLB has forced on all our schools, as you brought up. The most fun I had were teachers who taught “outside the box” and devoted time to their passions, whether those passions were official or no. I had a Kennedy-assassination enthusiast for American history, so we spent a ton of time on the Warren Commission, we saw the Zapruder film, the whole bit. It was fascinating — and no, it was not on the state standards.
I am extremely nervous about my children’s educational career. I have three daughters, and my eldest is only in K now. They seem to always doing “assessments”. For her, she’s excelling, but I fear the day she gets bored with all the testing. I also worry about not having the appropriate fun yet enriching assigments – just more busy work. My girls are quite bright compared to their peers – who at this early age seem only interested in Hannah Montanna, while my girls are interested in the planets, and science projects and learning embroidery.
I always reserve the right to homeschool, though. But for now, I just provide plenty of fun learning activities at home and am blogging about our activities to keep myself motivated (three little ones tire me out so much!).
[...] Translation? SIT = School Improvement Team. The SIT is charged with developing a SIP for the school. SIP = School Improvement Plan. In MCPS, every school develops one. It’s all part of the monstrous, soul-sucking Baldridge Plan hoo-ha that MCPS adopted several years ago. Data and benchmarks and “stakeholders” and “mission statements” and databinders for second-graders (shudder). [...]
[...] blogging, it’s practically a tradition! Yes, it’s time for my annual post (or two or three…) about the kick-off of Maryland School Assessment prep season. And this year brings a [...]