Testing

We just got finished with week 1 of 3 for standardized testing. Some portion of our students are testing three days of the week. It's an extremely institutional and sterile process: students are in a silent room, are not allowed to have any materials with them other than testing materials, can only go to the bathroom one at a time escorted by a staff member, etc. It literally sucks the joy out of learning. I understand the need for some level of assessment of students, and I'm not saying that I have the answers on how that should be done, but I do feel that relying 100% on standardized tests is not the way to go.

As to how this fits in with textbooks....well, at a certain point, if schools have to meet certain standardized testing benchmarks, they are going to begin teaching to the test. And if standardized tests include lots of short, choppy, unrelated snippets of text followed by multiple choice questions, that is what schools are going to begin looking for in text materials. And if the complexity and coherence of a lengthy text are not sought after in the classroom, I am concerned about the thinking skills that we are teaching. As one teacher in Savage Inequalities is quoted:

The result of this regime is that the children who survive do slightly better on their tests, because that's all they study, while the failing kids give up and leave the school before they even make it to eleventh grade.....They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination. If they get to college they do not know how to think. They know how to pass the tests and this may get them into college, but it cannot keep them there. We see students going off to Rutgers every year. By the end of the first semester they are back in Camden. So we teach them failure.