The first-grade teachers at Skelly Elementary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sent a letter home to parents to describe the over testing of their children.
They explained their professional qualifications, then listed the many tests the children are expected to take, stealing time from instruction.
Unfortunately, in the recent years, the mandates have gradually squelched the creativity and learning from our classrooms. The problem is that we are having to spend WAY too much time on formal assessments. All of the testing is required and some of it is classified as High Stakes Testing (HST). A high-stakes test is any test used to make important decisions about students, educators, schools, or districts, most commonly for the purpose of accountability—i.e., the attempt by federal, state, or local government agencies and school administrators to ensure that students are enrolled in effective schools and being taught by effective teachers. In general, “high stakes” means that test scores are used to determine punishments (such as sanctions, penalties, funding reductions, negative publicity), accolades (awards, public celebration, positive publicity), advancement (grade promotion or graduation for students), or compensation (salary increases or bonuses for administrators and teachers). (Glossary of Education Reform, 2014)
This year, in first grade, your child is being asked to participate in the following assessments:
Literacy First Assessment: This takes anywhere from 40 minutes to over an hour per student to administer. This is a one-on-one assessment that is to be conducted quarterly or more for progress monitoring.
“Where to Start Word List”: This assessment correlating to the F&P screening. The purpose of this screening is to level each child and ensure they are given reading instruction on their level. After going through the word lists, then the child is screened using a book on the assigned level. This assessment is done quarterly or as needed to progress monitor. It takes 20-30 minutes per child is also a one-on-one assessment.
Eureka Math: Children are to be given a whole group, 60 minute math lesson that has an “exit ticket” assessment at the end of each lesson. Yes, they want first graders testing daily over the lessons. This exit ticket is not long, but it still takes time. It equilibrates to daily testing for 6 and 7 year old children. This math curriculum also had a mid-module assessment and end of unit assessment.
iRead: iRead is a software program that the district requires children to be on for 20 minutes a day. It comes with an abundance of software issues and frustrations. The district has been working diligently on trying to get this programming to run successfully, but so far, to no avail. Part of this computer based program is a literacy screener. This screening takes place at the beginning of the year, and last 30-45 minutes per child.
MAP: Map is a computer based test that was designed as a tool for progress monitoring students in both math and literacy. This is the High Stakes Test that the district also utilizes for our teacher evaluations. It is completely developmentally inappropriate and does not provide valid data in the early childhood domain.
All of these tests, plus assessments that we utilize to document their understanding of certain content, are going on in your child’s first grade classroom. I believe you are getting the point… assessments, assessments, assessments! In our classrooms the children spend, on average, 1,510 minutes (25 hours) completing assessments. 720 minutes of those assessments are one-on-one. That means that we are tied up assessing students for at least 17, 280 minutes a school year. Your children are losing 288 hours of time with their teacher because of mandated testing. When you break down our days and count for specials, lunch, and recess, we end up with about 4 hours of instruction time. So, 288 instructional hours, or 72 days… yes, 72 days of our school year we, as teachers, are tied up assessing students with the mandated assessments. Why are our schools failing? Why are children not learning how to read? We think the numbers above answer those questions.
This is what it looks like when teachers stand up for their students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is unclear from the letter if the MAP exam is high stakes for students. Those exams are no stakes exams for students in my local district.
Until the children are ranked, stacked, sorted and shamed.
Every test is high-stakes for a first grader.
Dienne,
Even teacher constructed tests?
In my opinion, yes.
On the subject of the Obama children’s education vs. the “No Excuses” charter model that the above six schools follow (and on display on the video below) …
… here’s thought experiment.
Imagine what would happen if Barack and Michelle paid a visit to their school, snuck in the back of the class (the point-of-view of the camera) and witnessed this indefensible horror:
I imagine Barack and/or Michelle interrupting this atrocity, screaming,
————————-
“STOP!!! STOP!!! STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!!! What the BLEEP do you think you’re doing to my child, and to the rest of these children???!!!
(to the teacher)
“What’s your name?! Where’s the principal?! We need to talk to her right now!!!!”
(taking Sasha or Malia by the hand, talk to her)
“We’re getting you out of this freak show before you suffer any more damage!”
————————-
However, we all know that the teaching in this video does not and never will happen at…
Sidwell Friends (the Obama’s kids school),
or at Lakeside in Seattle (where Gates kids go)
or at the Montessori school (where NY State Ed. Commish John King sends his kids),
or at Chris Christie’s kids private school,
or at the Chicago Lab School (where Emanuel sends his kids and also where my own nephew and niece attend, by the way)…
as there is a difference between the education enjoyed by the children of the elite—including the Obama kids—and the education that “corporate reformers”, in their end game, are designing for “other people’s children—those of the middle and working classes.
The Third Reich would have been proud of such militarism & regurgitation. Unreal! Scary! Only used on black & brown kids.
How hilariously sad that they are singing and chanting about freedoms and no one having power over too many people. Can you imagine these children answering every adult in song and chant and canned responses? I don’t even know what to make of this.
The teacher snapping at the kids, yelling at the kids, pointing at the kids, barking at the kids….the kids barking, singing, chanting back. Yikes. So these no excuses schools turn the kids into parrots?
Did you hear the little shout out to McDonalds? Is the teacher preparing them to work at McDonalds? She certainly isn’t preparing these kids for life. Imagine transferring out of this school after a few years into a “normal” classroom – how do those kids who leave function afterwards without barking and parroting and singing and clapping and stomping and dancing and shaking and……….
OMG…they sound like PARROTS.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s high stakes or not with that many tests…it is just another test that takes quite a bit of time.
KS ≠ OK
Wow! Look at all the product opportunities in that list!
I wonder what else could be marketed and what profit opportunities could be derived.
If we could just create enough a crisis, we could generate a need those products, sort of like what the shaving industry has done with body hair.
Well, class, in answer to your question, in February, we shall have a break from testing and test prep for two days of regular classwork.
How is an exit ticket at the end of a math lesson any different from independent practice that is graded by a teacher that has been part of math instruction forever? Are we to add up testing minutes as any time a kid does something that an educator will review for evidence of mastery/quality/proficiency/anything?
The difference is, this exit ticket comes after a ONE HOUR test-prep lesson.
When will these module-makers come to the realization that there just aren’t that many “teachable moments” in a school day or even a school hour. Less is often way more when it comes to six year olds. The phrase “exit ticket” should not be in the vocabulary of any six year old because it is taking the place of any number of actually meaningful terms.
For a first grader — !!! — “exit tickets” are used in math class to sort of check for conceptual understanding about various things — nothing to do with “independent practice”. The latter would be appropriate for a first grader — not the former. When my kids were in first grade (the youngest is a sixth grader now), the kids took NO tests. That is as it should be. If I had one in first grade, and this was going on in their classes, I would home school or private school. I am sure many other parents will do likewise — many already are. We create the society that results from our policies — ANY testing for first graders is a bad move.
Hear, hear!
MTAST,
Please contact this fellow mtast at dswacker@centurytel.net . I’d like to speak/communicate with you about what we might be able to do here in the Show Me State in regards to these educational malpractices.
Thanks,
Duane
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Stand up and support the1st grade teachers in Oklahoma who refuse to test their students for hours as mandated by the Obama DOE and its gestapo bureaucrat boss, Arne Duncan.
Two teachers seem to be the writers of this letter. Their superintendent was of no help in addressing the problem. Not mentioned in this post is a required student survey, proctored, meaning teachers trade classrooms to administer the surveys–a process that they say takes two and one-half hours primarily because grade 1 students are not savvy about the “yes, no, sometimes” answer format and cannot read the questions.
What first grade students who cannot read questions?!? They are not college and career ready! Shocking.
Teachers should do more of this weighing in. I don’t know if I’m an outlier but I’ve had 4 thru public schools and I’d always want to hear from local practitioners.
Even if they disagree I can’t imagine parents not wanting to hear from someone who is with their child every day in a specific school. The fact is we don’t know that much of the day to day, even if we’re engaged and paying attention. We know even less of comparisons ( if testing is increasing or changing instruction year over year) because we get only a snapshot of the period our children are in school.
There’s only two people who can give us what I consider reliable, specific, relevant information on how these state and national trends and policies play out in real life, and one of them is a child 🙂
Many of us cannot speak up, Chaira. In Utah, we could lose our teaching licenses for telling parents about the testing and their ability to opt out of the testing.
That is so blatantly illegal it needs to be challenged in court. Someone who is close to retirement or who has a spouse who can support them needs to take on that challenge and speak up anyway. If they try to take his/her license, take it to the highest court in the land if need be. In fact, the more who can do this, the better, and not just in Utah but in any state where they are threatening licenses. The ONLY reasons one can legally lose a validly earned license is by gross malpractice or ethical violation. In fact, whoever is threatening teachers’ free speech rights in this way needs to lose their license.
Dienne –
You’ve overlooked the fact that the highest court in the land has been bought out. No free speech for those responsible for holding back the “great civil rights movement of our times”.
We were told NOT to say anything about opt-out
Way to go! I hope you inspire more teachers to stand up against standardized testing, especially for the youngest kids.
Teacher Pride!
We have a Code of Ethics for teaching & must protect children from harm. We do it very well! We protect kids from bullets, tornadoes, bullies, germs, criminals, tend boo-boos & provide millions of nurturing interactions.
We must ALL STOP TESTING CHILDREN and stop the process to make more $M for corporations and foundations.
The teachers are a credit to their profession. They join physicians, in protecting those entrusted to their care, “First, do no harm.”
The comments from the TPS superintendent in the Tulsa World are very interesting.
http://ow.ly/EvzBn
http://ow.ly/EvzBn
Some interesting comments from the Tulsa superintendent in the link above.
Good for these ladies:)
We lost a teacher today, a newbie in her second year. She has lost hair and weight due to stress. She is leaving at Thanksgiving break. It makes you wonder how teaching will look in a few years: will anyone be willing to teach in poor schools?
Only if they want to teach in charter schools.
The superintendent in this system is insulting these teachers by claiming that they are too young to understand what’s important for children. This is the same superintendent who announced openly in August that his school district, one of the largest in the state, would use Common Core even though CCSS had been removed as the state standards by state law. This same superintendent accepted large grants from the Gates Foundation to develop a teacher evaluation which has been adopted by a large number of school districts in the state. He cannot afford to ignore these teachers. They will need our support. There is more to this story than meets the eye.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I appreciate the loss of instructional time in the general education classroom… I really, really do. However as a music teacher–who also happens to be good friends with my other “special” area colleagues, I would like to remind general classroom teachers that your “special” areas teams also deliver instruction, their own curriculum and instruction that complements what goes on in your classroom. There is so much research that demonstrates the value of music, visual arts, PE, and reading for “pleasure” to what goes on in the general education classrooms… that I become incensed when what we do in the music rooms, art rooms, libraries, gymnasiums is discounted by our colleagues. There is no longer any excuse to say to your students as you drop them off to our classrooms, “Have fun!” as if our classes are playtime or an extension of recess. We have high expectations of our students and ourselves.
Tonight I am highlighting song texts and music symbols to enable my second graders to read the words of the songs and find their way though each piece of music. I teach my students that songs are poems set to music, and they are amazed at this discovery. We read texts, chant texts–working on speaking expressively. And along with learning the texts, students learn the melody of each piece of music. Some days we do music math, and no, it’s not about counting beats! We learn about duration, longer and shorter, less than and greater than, patterns, faster and slower. I will often include songs that include vocabulary that is being learned in the classroom, using the same language as classroom teachers. Sometimes I even make up songs for my colleagues, changing words, creating new text, or even writing a song to fit with needs other than in my room.
I applaud the courage of the Oklahoma teachers, your colleagues and mine, as they stand up and reveal what is really happening in the classroom, how much instruction in all areas is being stolen from students to administer assessments and prepare for the unknown in those assessments. I hope more teachers take the lead of the first grade teachers at Skelly Elementary School. It is time for more of us to stand up and say enough, and it is time for our principals, administrators and superintendents to take a stand…because they also know better than to harm the young children of our country with the insanity that is being forced upon American Public Education. We must reveal to parents, community members, grandparents, tax payers the money grubbers who are threatening to destroy and steal American Public Education.
It is foolish to make yourself an adversary to the gen ed teachers. As a parent of 3 music-techies, I know it is only your courses that kept my kids in school K-12. What they learned in music & arts courses enabled them to excel in ELA & make heads or tails of Math. The leviathan that is starting to swamp these teachers is coming your way, & most likely will eliminate your disciplines first.
“There is no longer any excuse to say to your students as you drop them off to our classrooms, “Have fun!” as if our classes are playtime or an extension of recess.”
Funny thing that when my classes take a test/quiz (teacher made of course) I tell them to “have at it and HAVE FUN”. Why shouldn’t all learning be fun, enjoyable, etc. . . ?
“There is no longer any excuse to say to your students as you drop them off to our classrooms, ‘Have fun!’ ”
I agree this is wrong. Fun should happen all day at school for all kids, yes, even (or especially) at high school.
These are two very brave women! Do they still have jobs?
I would have been fired before I left the building.
This post brought tears. CONGRATULATIONS, TEACHERS, FOR COMMUNICATING THIS TO PARENTS. The similarly-outrageous situation this brought to mind was a 2nd-gr teacher in the early ’90’s who req’d my eldest & and a friend– both gifted, one adhd the other LD– to attend school on a Sat to ‘catch up’ on [weeks of] homework. This was just prior to a local-district parent revolt against age-inappropriate hw, after which the primary teachers got a clue. It took me a shrink’s support to learn by the time my eldest was in 3rd grade to alert the teacher: 2 hrs hw is more than age-appropriate: I will simply mark any teacher’s assnt: ‘1/2-hr spent, OK.’
What you are going through is all the more OUTRAGEOUS because it is state-imposed. GOOD ON YA for making your voices heard in s public forum.
I admire this group of teachers and their advocacy. I get concerned, however, that in advocacy we tend to neglect the important role that sound and meaningful assessment plays in an educational program. So it we can and do successfully dump the tests for placement and promotion, the computer based learning/assessments that run on glitchy software, the accountability tests for NCLB and RTTT etc., WHAT ASSESSMENTS DO THE FIRST GRADE TEACHERS WANT TO USE during the year, to facilitate their work which is to help children learn and succeed? How will they know what the children already know, what they need to learn, and whether or not they have learned it?
How about whatever assessments the TEACHERS deem appropriate for their students? It was once commonly accepted the the experts were the folks who spend their days with the kids.
Warning! Vocabulary Nazi in this post.!
“It equilibrates to daily testing for 6 and 7 year old children.”
verb (used with object), equilibrated, equilibrating.
1. to balance equally; keep in equipoise or equilibrium.
2. to be in equilibrium with; counterpoise.
verb (used without object), equilibrated, equilibrating.
3. to be in equilibrium; balance.
Equilibrate is a term I would expect to hear from an edudeform expert or from an administrator mindlessly repeating said word in order to sound smart.
It’s a word I would expect to see in a technical manual or an unreadable (and largely unread) academic work. Very cringe-worthy.
Also, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone use the word “utilize” where it wouldn’t have been better to just say “use.” Fancy people don’t use things, they utilize them.
I admire these two teachers for having the guts to speak out. I wish them the very best. Teachers are afraid of losing employment in this horrible economy. There have been so many toxic, horrible changes to teaching as a profession since the Bush and Obama presidencies. I used to feel honored for being a teacher. Sadly, as I near retirement in 2 years, I feel hated by the state of Ohio. My state of Ohio makes me feel like I need “squashed” like a deadly bug, so that I can do no more harm to my students.
BRAVO OK! Progressive NY could learn a thing or two from your brave souls. I’ll use your letter to inspire parents in my own school. Thank you.