Right, so it seems I haven't had a thing to say since sometime last year. The truth is I've had plenty to say, most of it, of course, about the state of American public education - something I decided a while back not to discuss anymore.
But it's started getting to me again. It's less of an "I hate my job! I'm so stressed out!" sort of thing, more of an anger about how the whole system is set up, and how it's just so wrong. Wrong for the people who work in the schools, wrong for the people who teach, wrong for, most importantly, the students.
Lately the buzz is that superintendent Dr. M wants 25 percent of our teacher evaluations to be based on student performance...which sounds good until you get to the rest of it: on standardized tests.
There are some grades [including the one I currently teach] that do not have to administer the big, nasty, evil TAKS test. The tests that grades PK-2 administer include the Texas Primary Reading Inventory [TPRI] and Dallas ISD-created Benchmark tests.
The TPRI is extremely time consuming - the test is administered one child at a time, and can take anywhere from 15 minutes for a very good reader, to an hour if the student is really struggling and reads below grade level. During the time that these tests are given, the rest of the students in the class are basically left unattended, since, at least at my school, there are not enough teacher's aides to go around. Besides, unless you're a bilingual teacher, you'd better forget about asking for the help of an aide.
So, there are 18 kids in the classroom doing busywork, one kid and the teacher in the hall doing a test. Now, I'll admit that the TPRI does seem to be a good measure for tracking student reading progress, but I must add that there is a lot of room for errors in this thing, and I wouldn't doubt that some teachers might fudge their findings a little to cut down on testing time and paperwork.
The District benchmark tests, too, leave a lot of room for, let's say...freedom in scoring. I have to begin by stating just how asinine these tests are. Fellow teachers and I have speculated on what variety of monkeys created the tests, or perhaps, we concluded, they were created by someone in a district Microsoft Word training program. The Social Studies test alone was so filled with clip art that it led me to, somewhat jokingly, sadly, somewhat seriously, note on a data analysis of the test that I would need to incorporate more clip art into my lessons to ensure higher passing rates on the next round of Social Studies benchmarks.
The math test included things that we were instructed by our Scope and Sequence [a sort of blueprint of what we're supposed to teach and when - Jim Schutze wrote an excellent article about the contradictions and flat-out errors in these documents for the Dallas Observer back in November] not to have taught yet; the reading test was far too challenging for, at least, my school's population, as most of them are still struggling to acquire English, their second language. Bottom line: these tests are filled with errors, they're hard for students to read due to poor quality of copies - they don't really mean anything! And now the boss wants this to be one quarter of the measure of my aptitude as an educator?
I know these people. I spend eight hours a day with them, and know some of them better than their own families know them. They tell me things they don't tell their parents, and I see them do things that no test can measure. I see other teachers with their students, too, and it's pretty much the same everywhere. We work and work with them, we teach and reteach, we struggle and we try, and so do the kids. But we all still get to feel like failures when we receive the benchmark scores - few kids score above 80 percent; most kids fail at least one of the tests. I only had two students in my class pass all four tests. Does this mean I'm a bad teacher teaching a class full of idiots? I don't think so, and I don't think that my evaluation should be measured this way.
Why not talk to the students? The parents? I don't know...maybe the teachers themselves? We are required to do a small self-evaluation, but it's not anonymous, so I'm sure many people are not totally honest. Speaking of - these benchmark tests? How might you think they're scored? Do the students enter their answers themselves? No, no. Not in the primary [PK-2] grades. They're too little to fill in circles on a Scantron sheet, so the teachers fill in the answers from what the students have marked in a test booklet. What's to say a teacher, in fear of a negative evaluation, won't just go ahead and fix some of those incorrect answers? No one audits this stuff, and no one would ever know.
My idea to solve some of this mess? Start with a totally anonymous self-evaluation by every teacher in the district. Ask tough questions - things like, "Do you yell at students in your class?" "Do you feel that your school's principal is a good leader?" Ask things that we're afraid to answer when our names are tied to it. Get the real truth about what's going on in classrooms. No silly benchmark test is going to tell you that.
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