John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the cruelty of Oklahoma’s new crackdown on test scores.
He writes:
I wonder how most teachers responded to Nuria Martinez-Keel’s Tulsa Public Schools Ups the Intensity to Prepare for High Stakes Testing. I’m confident that few educators would be surprised by the language used by those who are implementing Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ teach-to-the-test program. But, how many would believe that fellow educators really believe it will work?
Martinez-Keel reports that “Angie Teas, a Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) instructional leadership director spoke positively about “a renewed focus on both academic standards and preparing students to take the standardized exams.” I was struck, however, by Teas’ words, “state tests are ‘part of our lives’ every year in public schools, but this testing season is ‘important for its own outside reasons.’”
It seems likely that the “outside reasons” she cites are Superintendent Walters’ threats to takeover the TPS, as well as his order to immediately “elevate 12 of its schools off of the ‘F’ list.” In response to this seemingly impossible target, “the district provided high-dosage tutoring to 470 fourth and fifth graders, launched a campaign to combat chronic absenteeism and focused on credit-deficient seniors at struggling high schools to boost graduation rates, among other initiatives district leaders highlighted.” (A total of 1,125 elementary students will be served in a district with more than 33,000 enrollees.)
I suspect that most educators would be supportive of efforts to assist small numbers of students if those policies were disconnected from test results, and they did not have the potential to undermine meaningful teaching and learning in the district as a whole. I find it hard to believe that teachers who saw the harm inflicted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT) on students would not recognize why this new, stress-driven approach is also doomed to fail.
The narrative of educators in the story about upping the intensity of high-stakes testing is interesting, and it reminds me of the scripts my administrators would use as my colleagues repeatedly shouted back when ordered to do what virtually everyone saw as educational malpractice. As Martinez-Keel reported:
Burroughs Elementary is one of the schools identified for improvement. Principal Dee Tisdale said the school has added academic rigor, focused on testing data and added extra resources, and it “all ties back” to individualized, small-group instruction between students and their teacher.
With state testing only days away, the mentality at Burroughs is “now it’s showtime.”
“I think in terms of the big championship game,” Tisdale said. “We’re just preparing, and we’re hoping that all of our practices will give us the trophy in June or July when the results come back.”
And as the TPS instructional leadership director Angie Teas said:
It’s nerve-wracking to feel the pressure of, ‘Oh my God, it feels like the world is watching,’ yeah,” … “But it’s also exciting to recognize that we’ve had an opportunity, like with OTEP (Oklahoma Teacher Empowerment Program) to be more all-parts-equal to the entire whole. We all see our part in the district that in a way I don’t think we have in a really long time.”
Martinez-Keel also cited an elementary teacher:
She felt ‘a little bit of pressure’ to make academic gains in only six small-group sessions. [Charity] Hargrave teaches fourth grade at Skelly but, through the OTEP program, was assigned 27 fifth graders at her school for extra instruction.
She said she had a ‘very short period of time’ to review benchmark test scores for each student, group them based on their performance level and plan lessons for each session.
But the experience has been positive, she said, and she hopes it will continue in the future.
Similarly, Asriel Teegarden said “Sometimes, there’s a little bit of fear about the unknown.” After a “30-minute lesson – featuring a space-themed reading comprehension exercise,” she asks her students “how did they feel about the ‘big test’ next week?” Then, “Teegarden said there’s a ‘different intensity level’ ahead of the most important testing period of her career.” But then she concluded:
Usually, I would be nervous for these children, but I’ve gone about it like, ‘I’m excited you’re going to take this because you’re going to all do great,’… ‘Everything has got to be positive, giving them a lot of positive feedback. I think they’re going to do excellent.’
Of course, that sounds like wishful thinking to me. But I used to engage in a forced optimism in order to remain in the classroom and serve my students. Being an award-winning, veteran teacher who was successfully engaged in meaningful, challenging instruction, I was able to negotiate compromises with my principals who knew I would not participate in teach-to-the-test. I even agreed to an experiment in teaching a class in a way that would raise test scores without undermining my students’ meaningful learning. We produced the school’s highest History test results, but despite our best efforts, the stress overtook both my students and me. I swore to never again let testing influence our lessons.
Holistic instruction became more difficult over the years when my students from the poorest elementary schools volunteered that they had been “completely robbed of an education” by test prep.
Then, I came back from retirement to teach at an alternative charter school that was like my first school which served students with felony convictions. But then the top administrator ordered the principal to order me to focus solely on the few who had a chance to pass the Common Core high stakes tests. My principal asked me to briefly comply while she tried to persuade the district administration to cancel that plan. She said that they didn’t understand that this year’s end-of-instruction-exam was just a pilot, and thus wasn’t a graduation requirement. She was confident she could persuade them to withdraw the order to just assign most students worksheets, and focus solely on 3, 4, or 5 students per class.
Of course, my students were horrified by the new system, but they trusted me to not follow those rules except for a brief time. However, when my principal apologized and said that the new system had to become permanent, she knew I’d resign, and I did.
So, I won’t criticize the 45 teachers who are each trying to help 25 or so students in the hope that they will benefit. I also appreciate journalists who are reporting on the stress being inflicted on teachers, and whether the data-driven, rushed interventions will somehow produce more good than harm. But I hope students will be their new priority as they review the research and the history of the failure of these sorts of mandates. And above all, I hope we will listen to our kids as the stress of test-prep is added to the stress of poverty, and attending high-poverty schools that are under attack by Ryan Walters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many of these radical red state governors are putting pressure on students and by association schools. The threat of school closure or takeover looms in the background of these tests, and many students have performance anxiety. It is an unnecessary and unhealthy way to end the school year. Standardized testing does not improve education. Students are not standardized. Better results are achieved through teacher created, summative assessments as well as through other performance measures.
“Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into Tyranny. The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information.”
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
“If you want different results, do not do the same things.”
In the real world grade point averages and SAT scores only matter for a worker’s first job. After that, employers care far more about the quality of the work. There is no shortage of incompetent workers who have high SAT and ACT scores.
Yes, and the GPA is a better predictor of college success than SAT scores, but the testing industrial complex wants to convince politicians and parents otherwise.
GPA and SAT scores are an even better predictor of college success than GPA alone. There’s a reason so many colleges are dumping test-optional.
This is actually a reply to FLERP! Yes, there is a reason schools are dumping test optional (but not “so many”): the elites like to perpetuate themselves.
In no fan of the SAT, but here’s my view of why it’s being revived. The top Ivy colleges had 50,000+ application for about 2,300 seats. Some had an acceptance rate of 3%. They will use the SAT as a rough sorting method, eliminating everyone whose scores were below a benchmark.
We all know about Campbell’s Law; the entire test-taking enterprise has corrupted any hope of authentic learning. Even worse, researchers like Daniel Koretz have confirmed what educators have known since forever. Test prep creates “gains” that are artificial (test score inflation) and only provides meaningless, invalid information. So the educators and kids will continue to suffer under the pressure to create fake “gains”, while the testing companies continue to line their pockets. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED488711.pdf
With a national growing shortage of teachers, maybe all the teachers in Oklahoma will find public school teaching jobs in other states and move.
Then MAGA Oklahoma can do what they really want to do. Take all children who have parents that do not belong to the MAGA cult and sent them prison camps to be taught by AI programs.
The top of MAGA list for the best candidates to run those schools should start with:
Drum roll please!
Eva Sarah Moskowitz
or
Kristi Noem
or
Marjorie Tylor Greene
Who else qualifies in MAGA land to join that list?
“But, how many would believe that fellow educators really believe it will work? “
None!
Well considering that adminimals consider themselves to be “educators” perhaps we need to carve out an exemption for them. It gives them something to do and feel important about.
““I think in terms of the big championship game,” Tisdale said. “We’re just preparing, and we’re hoping that all of our practices will give us the trophy in June or July when the results come back.”
OMFG! Really? Tisdale should not be allowed anywhere near a school. Using students to “give us a trophy”. How sick! How unethical! How atrocious!
From the conclusion of “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”:
The truth and the only conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that the educational malpractices of educational standards and standardized testing are so rife with conceptual and consequential errors and falsehoods that to use the invalid results of said processes to evaluate any aspect of the teaching and learning process and/or students can only be described as illogical, invalid, unethical and mind-bogglingly insane. Yet those practices and their offshoots in teacher evaluations continue to be used on a daily basis.
Should the state, through the public education system, be using undeniably false and invalid malpractices, malpractices that have been proven to lack “fidelity to truth” and that harm students?
No! The conclusion to be drawn from using these malpractices is that the usage of the results is unjust in discriminating against some students by sorting, ranking and grading (many times in error) by student characteristics that are largely determined by genetic inheritance, family and social influences outside the control of the individual and teacher. Not only that, but that vast resources are being wasted and educational opportunities for students are being restricted in the name of test prep denying the student ample opportunity to “savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Should the state, through the public education system, demand that teachers break codes of professional ethics?
No! Distressingly, if a teacher doesn’t comply with these legally mandated malpractices, it is all but guaranteed that they will not only be reprimanded but worse, letters written against the teacher to be put in his/her file ultimately resulting in his/her termination usually for “insubordination” in not following these unethical mandates. While it is perfectly legal for the administration do punish teachers, where is the ethics in that? Or justice?
Should the state through its public schools, be in the position of discriminating against some students while rewarding others through bogus practices? Where is the justice in that?
Just as discrimination against students due to skin color, gender orientation and/or disability status has been adjudicated as unconstitutional so should the daily discrimination that results from the standards and testing regime be adjudicated not only as unconstitutional but should be judged to be the unjust and unethical practices that they are. There is no justice in state approved discrimination!
Should the state, through its public schools, contravene its stated purpose of public education and government by demanding compliance with the standards and testing regimes that only results in not promoting “the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry”?
The answer has to be NO!
When will the insanity of the grading, sorting and separating and ranking of students, of the standards and testing malpractices end for the most vulnerable of society, the children?
After more than twenty years of over-testing, I hardly know anyone anymore who still remembers how to teach without fretting over the worthless scores. Everyone I know repeats the lie to the middle school students that poor scores will ruin their high school and college futures, making that empty threat over and over, year after year. It’s difficult to watch. It’s impossible to make it stop.