This rural teacher says his head is about to explode.
The state says he has to give test after test after test to his first graders.
Then he has to convert those scores into a letter grade.
This doesn’t make any sense to him.
The children are just beginning to make sense of letters and words.
How can he reduce what they have learned to an A or a B or a C or….?
What shall he tell their parents?
Does this make any sense?
Is it developmentally appropriate?
Do they do this at the University of Chicago Lab School or Sidwell Friends?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is more than sad. This is tantamount to child abuse. It’s bad enough telling middle and high schoolers that they are failing and are substandard but to do this to babies just starting their educational lives is horrible.
More developmentally appropriate might be to say not yet, in progress, and “gets it” or something like that.
Last week during PD at my school my principal said she wanted all the children in the school, including pre-k, to be able to articulate in what area they are failing so if she comes into a room the students can say, I can’t do………I need help. How about articulating what you are good at? what you are interested in?
It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and all I could think of was Brave New World..I am glad I am a Delta. I wear blue. I like blue. I am glad I am not a Beta. They wear green. I do not like green.
What are we doing to our children? One of my colleagues suggested that we are back at the beginning of the 20th century producing workers for factories. But this time the factories are Wal-Mart, Target, and all the other Big Box stores.
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Making a small child recite his failures and then ask someone other than his teacher for help can have no outcome other than reinforcing the child’s frustration, helplessness, and (if these recitations are to be done in the presence of other students) shame,and promoting the idea that his teacher is either unwilling or incapable of helping him. It seems that in this situation your principal is requiring you to inflict emotional abuse on your students. Parents should be immediately made aware of this situation so that they can take action!
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What he has to realize is that all children progress at the same exact rate. This rate is regular and extremely predictable. In fact, I hear that scientist are going to use this instead of carbon dating from now on.
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Adding to Scott’s insightful comments…
This teacher also should realize that the students really deserve to know where they stand relative to their peers and that the first 6 letters of the alphabet (except that worthless E) will give students the feedback they need and want. Since learning is a very linear and predictable process and the activity of the millions of neurons of a human brain isn’t very complex, summarizing children’s progress into 5 distinct categories will be very useful and appropriate. It actually makes a ton of sense to use the first few letters of the alphabet for these categories too, since the students will be familiar with them from their studies. This is certainly a step in the right direction. First graders in New York will finally get the information they need to progress, and this teacher will finally be held accountable.
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and thus professional sports in our nation will be unscathed!
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If you are not joking, then you need a major reality check
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You are making a joke, correct????
If you believe this statement to be true, then you have never worked one day as a teacher or in a public school classroom.
My experience is that this statement is blatantly false.
All children progress at diverse rates.
The rate is not predictable.
Carbon dating is predictable.
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My post was drenched in sarcasm…but I could envision someone (possibly the authors of an ‘accountability’ system like NY’s) saying and thinking such things.
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We recently had a conference with my daughter’s 1st grade teacher. My wife and I are both secondary teachers and had not yet reviewed Common Core standards for her grade. We shared a good laugh over many of them. Here’s our favorite: “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.1.9 Identify basic similarities in and differences between two texts on the same topic (e.g., in illustrations, descriptions, or procedures).” Most of the kids in her class, in a school Tony Bennett’s system rated an “A,” are still sounding out words and decoding. Who wrote these abominations and do they know anything about the natural development of children? Piaget must be rolling over in his grave.
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Yes, Piaget and John Dewey are spinning in their graves, and The Common Core Standards have been developed and imposed in part as an attempt to silence them forever, so that their ideas will no longer take root in education. Potential profiteering aside, much of corporate education reform can be seen as a willful attempt to banish from the schools the humanism that underlay the liberal arts, and the humanism that underlay the extensions in political and economic democracy that people fought for in the 19th and 20th century.
Just as contemporary neoliberal economics seeks to eliminate the expansion of democracy and increase in living standards for the many that constituted mid-twentieth century politics and economics, so too does corporate education reform – an inseparable part of neoliberalism – seek to banish the ghosts of Dewey, Piaget, Freire and others from the schools, to be replaced by authoritarian schools that serve the interests of the profiteers that are rapidly taking them over.
We should never forget that the tests are the curriculum, in that
through practice and constant repetition they inculcate certain habits of mind, and behaviorally prepare children for what is to be expected of them as adults in the workplace and the polity: passivity, obedience and blinkered expectations.
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Brilliant post. It should be “closely read” by all.
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Very Well Said.
A+
(Since we are supposed to give grades to everyone all the time;)
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The Common Core’s emphasis on rigor is also problematic for beginning readers. How the hell do you have children who are still developing sight word vocabulary and phonological skills supposed to read material above their grade level? We keep asking this question and get no definitive response. In the end teachers will have to do what’s best for their students. If it means saying you are teaching the CCSS and just doing your own thing, so be it.
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“If it means saying you are teaching the CCSS and just doing your own thing, so be it.”
If this CCSS garbage doesn’t implode on itself (and I’m pretty convinced it will. Typical “looks-good-on-paper-but-in-reality-not-so-much), this is what I’ll do. Show me the test; my students will pass. Other than that, I’m doing what I know needs to be done.
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I am honored beyond belief that Diane Ravitch would pick up my blog post. Just a minor detail that has no bearing on the content of the blog – I am Michelle Enser – a “she”. This has been the WORST year of teaching in my 27 years -including that horrible “first year” when I was finding my way.
The scariest part of all of this, is that with all the test data we are reporting and the grades I am giving – nothing jives. A student who has an “independent reading level” at A on Fountas and Pinnell scale, just scored as a “Probable Reader” on the STAR tests yeserday!
If ever I needed PROOF that testing tells me nothing – this first ten weeks has been it!
Thank you Dr. Ravitch for the mention and the link to my blog!
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I see the same kind of thing with my adolescent students. Their scores make no sense when I try to correlate them to the real individuals I see in my classroom every day.
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Well, the scores are a snapshot of the day of the assessment. In primary grades, I think: What if they wre up late watching something on TV or attending an event at school for an older sibling? What if they’re just “kind of sick” – not sick enough to stay home, but sick enough to not be focused? I don’t know what on earth adolescents ever think about other than their friends – but you get the point I’m sure!! 🙂
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“How one person’s abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business. It is irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.”
John Dewey
Democracy and Education, 1916
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Thank you for posting this fine quote.
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I lost points on my observation from hell because my 8th graders were not asking each other higher order thinking questions! I lost more points because it was unclear if they understand my sense of humor. I lost points for not using computers or clickers while I was doing a water convection current lab-8th graders water and electricity yeah why didn’t I think of that! The thermometers and graduated cylinders don’t count. They were using their brains and senses to observe convection currents.
Definition of TECHNOLOGY
1
a : the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area : engineering 2
b : a capability given by the practical application of knowledge
2
: a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge
: the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor
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There’s a disquieting irony to the use of test scores to evaluate students, and ultimately teachers and entire schools for purposes of improving achievement. At the heart of the Common Core Standards for literacy is the tenet of “evidence-based” thinking. Have any of the so-called education reformers been able to produce evidence that pinning test scores to teacher evaluations and school funding improves achievement? Is there any real science behind this approach?
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Ugh. Our district uses standards-based grading, “meets end of year standard,” “exceeds end of year standard,” etc. It’s more about telling you what progress the student has made than grading their level of effort.
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At my first grade parent conference in October, I was told by my son’s teacher that she never gives more than a “P” for proficient, yet he is reading at a second grade level. Clearly, grades at this age are irrelevant!
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My daughter is a first grader in a Chicago Public Schools’ neighborhood school. We get assignments home all the time with percentage grades—including on things like writing assignments! (She just got 98% on a writing assignment about the life cycle of a pumpkin. ?!!?!)
I am not a teacher and my knowledge about what is developmentally appropriate for kids her age pretty much comes from scanning the NAEYC website, but assigning percentages and letter grades at first grade seems insane. Especially because on top of this, there’s the fact that they have at least four different standardized tests this year—some up to 3 times—and the teacher was requesting parents sign their kids up for an hour after school in order to fit all the testing in, an hour in addition to a 7.5 hour school day!
(And we have it good! I know other CPS parents whose first graders are given 5-6 page, 60 question written exams, once a week, and if, god forbid, the child can’t read the instructions and questions themselves, the parent is told that their child is behind grade-level and “those third grade exams are coming up soon!”)
Really, really depressing…
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Am I to understand that this teacher must integrate standardized test results into his grading system? Some of those test results won’t be available until the next school year. Parts of them will contain content not necessarily covered in class. Are these standardized test to be used now to for student’s grades, as well as measuring the efficacy of the teacher, the school, the school system, and the state’s schools?
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I worked in a charter school where Kk +1st graders were given letter grades. The power punch of low grades for little ones and their parents was too painful to watch. Stamping ‘failure and at-risk, damaged goods’ on their foreheads is very damaging. Everything becomes high-stakes testing. Every little assignment, drawing, scribble, task, etc…become high-stakes. Admin defense for this: we must be honest with kids and parents. ‘If they have to repeat or do not pass the CRCT, then we must document that they did poorly all along’. Ripped their little hearts out! That school embraced NCLB, RT3+ $$$$$$$$$. Poverty paid big $$$$.
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The cruelty of de facto labeling of children, as is now common, is not seen by Mssrs. Gates, Broad, and their sycophantic spawn.
It should be established that: FORCING CHILDREN TO TAKE TESTS WHICH THEY DO NOT PASS IS HARMFUL. How many times should children be exposed to tests they donor pass before the reformers have the DATA they need?
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The “Assessment Report” is just that – a report to parents of all the tests/assessments that have been given since school started. It is not part of my letter grade. However, after completing these reports, I am amused to find that when you look at each data point in comparison with the others – they don’t agree. One ‘assessment’ has a student basically called a non-reader, while another says that same student is a “probable reader”. If it weren’t so deadly serious for these kids and their parents, I’d laugh my way through the conferences. Meanwhile, I am left to explain all the data in 20 minutes and answer the burning questions that most parents of first graders have : “How is my child doing? Are they making friends? Do they get along with the other students? and the dreaded: Will my child pass first grade?”
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“The (first graders) are just making sense of letter and words”? You’ve got to be kidding. First graders? That’s unacceptable. The quality of public education has really gone down hill.
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Research shows that by third grade, there is no difference in reading ability between kids who were taught to read early and those who were taught to read in first grade. Kids certainly can be taught to read before first grade, but it’s not really developmentally appropriate for most kids. For the kids who are ready, they will learn on their own regardless of whether they’re taught.
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Diane, I am a father & a teacher. I write a lot about abolishing grading. My daughter Kayley is in kindergarten and here’s a letter I drafted opting her out of grading.
http://www.joebower.org/2012/09/opting-out-of-grading-revised.html
Please feel free to share this so that parents may be empowered to give teachers permission to stop reducing children to numbers.
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I can’t even stand the frowny faces…or the “keep practicing” comments. If my five year old writes her first and last name ten times, she has practiced writing her first and last name ten times. I am pretty confident over the course of her life she will have lots of practice writing her name, so no need to admonish that she “keep practicing.” Her motor skills are her motor skills, and they will certainly improve over time as she DEVELOPS. I am not really directing my anger at the teachers. I see them as influenced, and intensely pressured, to get these little rats running through the maze successfully. And by God, they better hurry. Run fast, little people. No time for childhood.
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What a Dad! We teach our children by leading good lives and standing up for the truth. Good for you and your little one.
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