School: Testing & Grading

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."