A teacher writes about the testing program in her school. The goal is less about evaluating children than gathering data to evaluate their teachers. And they start early to learn the valuable skill of taking tests:
I teach in a public elementary school. Starting this year, our kindergartners must take the NWEA test three times, using a computer and a mouse. In order to begin the test, the child must find his or her name on a roster, click on it, and then enter a password. If the child cannot read, they must find the volume button, click on it, and listen to the questions being read out loud. To answer, they must click and drag the correct answer across the screen.
Five-year-olds are not adept at using a mouse. Children who have the same first or last name as another child will inevitably click on the wrong one and sign in as the other person. Children who don’t know how to find the volume buttons will either sit there doing nothing, or they will play around by clicking and dragging random answers around the screen, just for fun.
The rules state that there can only be a proctor in the room with the students (not the teacher). In our school, that means one adult with up to 36 children, all confused and clicking on this and that. It takes the poor proctor 45 minutes just to get them all signed in under the correct name.
The results of these tests will be a portion of our annual teacher evaluation this year. The results won’t mean a thing, except maybe to tell us which students know how to use a computer and a mouse.
We are in the process of testing now, and when the whole school is done, students in grades 2-8 will head right back to the computer lab to take a Common Core assessment. In the spring, we will take two weeks out of our instruction to administer our state test.
All I want to do is teach! But this constant testing is getting in the way of getting through a single unit. Every time we need to test, we have to put everything else on hold. Even after our testing is done, students who were absent need to be pulled out for makeup testing. Then those students need to make up what they missed in class. It is driving me crazy!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is Kafkaesque to the nth degree of madness. Thirty-six 5 year olds in one class with one teacher?? That alone is criminal but then to subject these children to testing and all the prep that might go with it is beyond belief. Obama’s, Duncan’s and Emanuel’s kids should all be subject to the same testing and overcrowding nightmare.
I remember kindergarten: the blocks, the housekeeping corner, the wooden puzzles, and playing “Duck, duck, goose” under the large horse chestnut tree in the schoolyard. And somehow I managed just fine in life.
Same here.
I think that’s exactly WHY you managed just fine in life! And that is exactly what kindergarten should be like. Children need to be children and not some computerized machines.
The first year our school did MAP testing on the computer, we included four year old and five year old kindergarten. The children actually switched computers in the middle of the test to sit next to a friend. Somehow this did not get noticed. I retired at the end of the year. The school district has since dropped the MAP for four year olds and five year olds take only the math portion, because the reading portion was replaced by an extremely complicated and utterly ridiculous screening test. All of this data, in my opinion, is worthless and takes up valuable classroom time. All we see now is frustrated and unhappy kindergarten children, who rarely smile. We have also taken away their play time and rest time. This is going to negatively affect our country for years to come. How sad. Where is the joy in learning? Where is the joy in teaching and helping children discover their unique abilities and self-worth.
I think this gets to a very important and overlooked element of the reform movement: What is an education? What is our vision of an educated person? When our children leave public education, what should they look like?
Without a real vision of what an education looks like, parents and the public seem to fall back on projecting their fears about their past, current, and future situations on their children. For decades now, most Americans have worried about losing their jobs to overseas competition or technological substitution. In either case, in our culture, the worker has “lost” in the Great Competition. They failed the Test of life. Perhaps then it’s not surprising that so many in the public fall into the testing trap: Since parents want their children to “succeed”, which usually is measured in terms of wealth and accumulation, they develop an almost neurotic focus on preparing their children by testing in schools to simulate the competition they’ll face in adult life.
For me, this is a narrow and withered view of education. I think education should be founded on the intellectual development of our children, so they can make the most full use of their minds. But this requires a range of activities and attention that on the surface have no direct connection to employment and acquiring wealth, such as art, music, reading for careful discussion and writing of what’s been read, public speaking, mathematics and science with an emphasis on understanding as well as technical execution, and foreign languages.
Give our national neurosis about jobs and wealth, these things all look extravagant and elitist. Thus, we don’t educate to build good citizens and workers who can wisely determine their commitments of time and resources. Instead we educate for passivity and the consumption of goods and services. This sort of education is more like instruction and is very amenable to delivery by computers and inexperienced teachers Historically, that sort of education and culture is a short term game, as we’ll soon learn.
Yikes! Do the parents know about this? If not, they should.
Why are we waiting until kindergarten? Pearson has found a way to give standardized exams to fetuses. #satire http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2012/10/city-to-release-exam-results-of-fetuses.html
This is a really really interesting article about grit and persistence and the importance of developing those traits in our kids, and how the leadership of two schools – one high poverty and one elite private prep academy – found themselves in someone’s office with the same problem of getting kids to push through frustration and difficult tasks. The idea of having a line on the report card for curiosity – I think that’s pretty cool.
http://www.edsource.org/today/2012/the-grit-factor-hard-to-measure-hard-to-succeed-without/20844#.UHcE1EJ-FPg
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This new body of research challenges the notion of reformers that great schools and great teachers are sufficient to overcome the rest of a disadvantaged student’s world. Tough’s reporting found some students need much more in order to concentrate on academics, to care about education, to trust the adults and their classmates in school.
Growing up in urban poverty, living chaotic lives, surrounded by violence, children face a double whammy: the trauma of deprivation and the effect of stress on the capacity to learn. Summing up the research on animals and long-term studies on children, Tough writes, “The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school.
“… when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students,” he continues, “they say the biggest problem they face is not children who don’t know their letters and numbers; it is kids who don’t know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation.”
I have such fond memories of kindergarten. The easel, the making of my hand print in clay, the little stove with the pots and pans and all the utensils, the story time, even the warmth of the sunshine coming through the windows and my teacher’s warm smile. Oh, I remember. What will the children of today remember?
Number 2 pencils, bubble-sheets, short answer responses and visits to their therapists.
I feel the pain. In my last school district, at the end of every nine week period, all the kids in grades 3 and 5 (and probably 4 by now) would have to sit for tests that would be rehearsals for the Big Test at the end of the school year. During each nine week period every teacher in the district was given a pacing guide that told them exactly what to teach and when. The test at the end of the none weeks would test that content. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. We had actually put in place a system where you could say “Hey, it’s Tuesday, every kid in the city in grade 3 is doing …” Of course, once the nine week tests were done I (the principal) would get the data and have the responsibility of calling in every teacher whose kids hadn’t made the grade. It bred fear and dependence and called into question the professionalism of teachers who became simply the implementers of someone else’s curriculum.
In my district, the reading teachers are proctoring the NWEA for first, second, and third grades. This means that AIS reading help ceases during the testing periods.
This is nuts!
Beth
Sent from my iPhone
To add to the confusion, there are three different ways to “mark” your answer on the computer! Some questions just require a click, other questions want the student to click and drag, and still other questions want the poor babies to click, drag, and click to release!!! They don’t know what to do!
I grew up in Europe and the first “test” we had to pass was a short written and oral “exam” at the end of 5th grade at age 11, when leaving elementary school. Yes, we got an annual report from our teachers with a grade, but that came from their year-long observations in the classroom. Reading about how children are being treated at schools today makes me sick to my stomach and I am looking with disgust at these developments. Unfortunately, many European countries tend to look to the U.S. and are currently adjusting their curricula, without realizing that this testing craziness will not help the children learn, but burn them out well before they get to college or into the real working life. I am a teacher myself and I can say with certainty that all this testing does not make our children smarter. On the contrary!
This illustrates the truth that testing is often inappropriate. I taught reading to middle school ELL kids who spoke NO English at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year they could read phonetically at a 7th grade level; but they had virtually no comprehension of what they were “reading”. My job was to teach them English phonics, not English; and they learned well. Administering the state reading test to these students was totally ludicrous. These kids learned quickly and well; and they learned what I taught. But the test was designed for native English speaking kids–not new immigrants. My students very rightly viewed the state test as an art project as they filled in the bubbles in a pretty pattern; it was a total waste of our time.
Exactly why we refuse to let our kindergarten kid take map tests. At her school they do it in prek too. Unfortunately in wi our gov has imposed the pals test on all kinder kids in the state….she wont be taking that either
The thought that Kindergartners can sit at computers and turn in a valid performance on a test is absurd, but am I reading this right, that there are 36 Kindergartners in a class? That is insane.
http://conceptualmath.org/misc/MAPtest.htm
this is a great site that paints a pretty bad bad picture for the MAP testing
Here is a great interview with reading expert Richard Allinington. One of the questions asked along with his to the point reply I am posting
Q: When schools implement RTI, they often use digital screening and monitoring tools for assessment …
A: It’s idiotic.
read the entire interview at http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2010/04/12/02allington.h03.html
I teach kindergarten. My 25 students took the MAP test at the beginning of the year and then again in December. The students have a certain number to score in order to be considered “met” in math or ELA. It’s insane because the scores are almost unobtainable! I’ve made my concerns known to all who will listen, but I have been told that the MAP is used to show accountability (not what we were told it was when it was first introduced) for our school.
I have students who are reading, adding and subtracting, and writing complete sentences. This doesn’t seem to be enough for our administrators. I know this is not developmentally appropriate for most of my students, so instead of coming home at the end of the day feeling that I’ve done what is best for my students, I feel guilty. Someone wrote in a previous post that “Learning should be a joy” and I agree. I see too many sad faces. I’m not too sure how much longer I want to teach.
Has anyone heard if NYC will begin testing in K, 1 and 2 in the 2013-2014 school year?
I see all of these people complaining about the MAP testing on Kindergarteners. I am a mother of a Kindergartner and she did VERY VERY well on the testing. As a matter of fact she scored so high that she could actually do 1st grade work. She IS able to read and write. Oh and she can use a computer better then most adults. It’s called working with your children people. This world is changing, evolving!! Instead of complaining how much work they do…..embrace it. Be happy that your children are learning and may end up being better and smarter then you!! That is all!!
As a teacher you have to adapt to change, and in the 21st century, computer know how is a must.
I was written up at my last K teaching job, for verbalizing your above sentiments when my kids were forced to take the NWEA assessment, half speaking English as a 2nd language, most from home w/out computer access being a title one school.
I now teach K and a better school, still charter, still a “turn around school”, still working with a population that is also title 1.
Better meaning: management is on the ball.
I just spent all night analyzing every print out and break down possible of my kids’ scores. So I could break them into groups and focus on skills they are lacking. Intentional teaching. The NWEA does this. It also holds me accountable as a teacher for specific learning and growth of my students.
It’s a lot of work.
But our schools are failing. A good teacher will put in the work.
Kindergarten kids can’t use a mouse? Teach them. Because let’s not lie, they can play games and pull up apps on cell phones and tablets.
Write a big long article about how terrible the NWEA is, or spend some time analyzing what you see in your kids’scores. choose to teach with the intention of actually teaching. it’s hard right?