Again, stepping away from my blog theme, I recently wrote an article describing the challenges we are facing in my school district. I shared this on Facebook, and while it went viral locally, I wanted to share it here and on twitter because it needs to be said and heard again and again.
To be clear, I LOVE teaching. I LOVE my students. I LOVE my school. I {usually} LOVE my school district. I am passionate about public education and believe strongly in public school.
My girls will go to public school because I know they will get a quality and diverse education there.
What needs to change is the amount of testing, corporations trying to make money off of the backs of the kids, and politicians who think that because they went to school years ago, they suddenly know how schools should run.
This year has been a challenge. Please read below.
"My
local teacher friends, you may or may not see this in the News Press
this weekend, but if so, I want to provide my words in their entirety.
As a union rep, I work for you and many times this means stepping out of
my comfort zone. Standing strong together.
Currently our
district is in a testing and grading debacle. This quarter has been a
complete mess at the elementary level. We have been charged
with implementing the new Common Core standards, along with adopting
TWO new curriculum programs, all within the same year. We were given no
training on the CCSS. The curriculum materials arrived late, and in many
cases, were still arriving as of last week. We had no opportunity to
take the time over the summer to delve into the curriculum to adequately
prepare ourselves.
In addition, the district decided to
create tests in the interest of having common assessments within our
curriculum across the district. While this might have been
well-intentioned, these assessments have been delivered late, riddled
with errors, aren't reliable or valid measures of ability, and have only
served to increase the amount of testing we have done in our
classrooms. We are having to proofread the tests after they are sent to
our classroom because they don't match the standards, they don't match
the academic plan, and they have questions that show bias.
One of our teachers estimated that general education students will spend
68 hours on these district created tests this year. Students with
accommodations spend even longer on these assessments. Previously our
district had started stepping away from testing, even signing a
resolution against high-stakes testing. We are spending more time
testing than teaching. We have to pray that kids are quick to "get it"
so we can get these tests in.
The current administration is
now having to fix what the previous administrative group had put in
place which has created chaos. We had so many issues that we were
directed to not send home interims. We, instead, sent a letter home from
one of our assistant superintendents describing what was happening.
They had hoped that after changing the categories, placing less weight
on the district tests, the problem would be solved.
However
that has not been the case. This past week has been the biggest mess
yet. Report cards for quarter 1 are due today. Many of us have
parent-teacher conferences today. On Wednesday, we were instructed to
add points to our district tests. In my grade level, we had to add 10
percentage points to each reading test. That was mild to what
intermediate had to do. Fourth grade had to add upwards of 30 percentage
points to 2 of their math tests. While scaling has been going on for
years from the state level with how they make adjustments to our school
grades on down, we were all appalled, but dutifully complied with the
directive. We fixed our report cards that had been ready for our
conferences.
Then late Thursday the district contacted the
schools to inform them that they had incorrectly scaled the math tests
and we needed to remove the scaled scores for them to rescale them and
then re-add the new scales.
As of right now, teachers are
holding conferences, but unable to give parents grades. We will be
unable to prove if a child needs assistance in their learning because
now everyone is passing. While we as teachers know the abilities of our
children, our anecdotal knowledge is not enough to prove if a child
needs more support. We need accurate grades & accurate assessments
to identify where we need intervene, reteach, carry on, or enrich. With
our current mess, we cannot do this effectively.
We teachers
carry on, trying to meet the demands of the district, while trying to do
what we are trained to do: teach and care for our students. We are
trying to shield them from over testing, but the tests are required. We
are in a catch-22. We don't feel comfortable changing grades. We don't
like over-testing our students. We want to teach."
