This is a guest post by Peter DeWitt on a topic that should concern us all.
We lack the infrastructure to be testing factories, and that shouldn’t be our job in the first place.
If the nightly news really wanted to look into the Fleecing of America, they need not look further than the serious fleecing that companies are doing to American schools. At a time when school budgets are being severely cut, many companies are offering to “help” schools and making multi-millions while doing it.
Whether it’s creating products to help in the adoption of the Common Core State Standards or selling schools textbooks that are aligned to high stakes testing, companies are there to meet every possible need of the school system and they are not doing it for free.
As with anything there are pros and cons to the Common Core State Standards. I think the six shifts will be helpful to our thinking as educators and it offers a base to build on. However, what is the most difficult aspect is the fact that schools will be required to buy new textbooks, software and offer professional development at a time when they lack the money to do so. Schools are in a bind because they no longer feel as though they can use products that are not aligned to the core.
We have had the perfect storm of implementing the Common Core and not having the ability to do it properly. Of course, all schools have to do it at a time when they also have to implement the new APPR which includes teacher/administrator evaluation being tied to high stakes testing.
The bigger issue for schools presently is the idea that next year or the year after that many states will be obligated to have their students complete high stakes testing on-line. For those schools that will dive into on-line assessments next year and those who will be required to hold on-line field tests, they have a lot of preparation to do.
On-line Exams
If you have ever taken a comp exam in college or in post graduate degrees you probably remember going to a testing center to take the exam. We all had to empty out our pockets to make sure we did not bring any accoutrements for cheating purposes. We had to sit at one computer with headphones where we could not talk with anyone and had to raise our hands if we needed a break.
The computers we took the tests on were not ones where you could Google something, and you certainly could not take anything in to the exam room with you. It came close to feeling like you needed a brain scan before you were allowed to take the exam to make sure it was really you. It sounds very adult-oriented or something from a sci-fi movie but that level of security may be coming to a school near you next year.
How will schools do it? We lack the infrastructure to be testing factories, and that shouldn’t be our job in the first place. Many schools gave up computer labs in order to use netbooks or get more desktops in classrooms to use for center-based learning. They have cut teachers and administrators so there are less people to police kids when they are taking the exam. Make no mistake, we have been given the task of policing kids. If you do not think that is part of the job of the teacher, you have not been paying attention.
Open up the first page of any NY State high stakes test, not that you were allowed to keep any because that would be cheating, and you will notice that the first page has a warning for anyone who may cheat. Apparently, many state education departments have such low expectations of us that they need to tell us what will happen if we cheat on the very first page of a test. How will teachers check each and every computer? How will they ensure that kids are not Googling answers? Remember, the stakes are high and students feel the pressures of testing.
Schools presently lack the bandwidth needed to support the number of students who will be taking these exams at the same time. In the future this will be beneficial for schools that want to go BYOD. However, right now there will have to be software updates to make sure students cannot multi-task on other sites at the same time they are taking the on-line assessments. Teachers and administrators need to make sure the computers are “secure.”
We all know that there are many very intelligent people out there waiting to “help” schools meet this need, which will be another cost accrued by districts. Schools are seen by many organizations and companies as the something to invest in but remember that invest has two meanings. As educators we invest our time into students so they can be contributing members of a democratic society. Companies are investing in what we do so they can make money.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog about the fact that state education departments want us to teach kids 21st century skills at the same time they make students take 90 minute paper and pencil exams. I guess I need to be careful what I ask for.
Peter Dewitt is an elementary principal in upstate, NY and he writes the Finding Common Ground blog for Education Week. Find him on Twitter at @PeterMDeWitt and http://www.petermdewitt.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“And when every last cent of their money was spent — the Fix-It-Up Chappie packed up, and he went.”
Genius!
You can’t Sneech a teach… Or, something like that.
I used to read that book to my kids and “forget” to read the very last page. Gives the story a bit of a different lesson — but still a valuable one!
Ah, but you can teach a Sneetch:
But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say
That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day,
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
Perhaps we non-Sneetches could learn the same lesson? Before it’s too late?
Unfortunately in many schools, the school counselors are required to be the test coordinators. This is an administrative task for which they do not pursue their masters degree. More importantly, coordinating testing takes school counselors away from helping kids. Parents should be very concerned about this. As we focus more on the value of social emotional learning and mental health, the staff member often most qualified to handle those issues is tied up preparing tests for bubbling. School psychologists are handling tests for exceptional needs, and social workers have unimaginable caseloads. Computerized tests may actually alleviate some of those tasks from our children’s counselors (at least they won’t have to spend hours unpacking and repackaging test forms). The rational solution is to stop relying so heavily on tests, of course, and to hire administrative assistants to handle the clerical pieces. But rationality frequently appears to be missing where testing is concerned.
Well said, Andy!
Definitely. We asked our counselor how much time she spent on the test scheduling, ordering, unpacking, packing, organizing, and the like, and she estimated 40 hours. That’s 40 hours she didn’t spend with students.
Another domino that’s falling in my daughters’ school district due to Common Core — the combined 2nd/3rd and 4th/5th classrooms that were put in place with considerable thoughtful discussion some years back, are now being abandoned with no such educational-merit conversations, because the new Common Core curriculum materials the district is purchasing do not offer a combined-grade version.
I’m particularly unhappy given my younger daughter’s situation — she has significant developmental disabilities, including autism, and we were so psyched when we made it to second grade to have the prospect of the default being the same teacher for two years, and a stable cohort of classmates. It takes a lot to get to know my child, and for her to feel comfortable, and the combined-grade model was (would have been) SO helpful in that regard.
This is one of the hidden deficiencies of NCLB and RTTT: they both perpetuate age-based grade-level cohorts which reinforces the factory school model and prevents the kind of individualization and innovation that many schools began pursuing before we got test-fever. We don’t ask students to take a driving test until we know they won’t wreck the car… why do we insist on testing students on materials we know they haven’t mastered YET but know they will master given the gift of time?
Just sat through another 2 hour PD on test prep. When I commented that I didn’t become a teacher to constantly do test prep and shove test prep worksheets in front of my students I was told by my peers that we have no choice.
At times we are our own worst enemy.
Yes, we are our own worst enemies at times.
We need to do our own wikileaks of embargoed tests…
Our school is very small and as the tech director I KNOW we will not be ready for online testing in 2014. I can’t imagine what larger school districts are going to do. Why are parents not standing up and saying, no I mean YELLING, Stop messing with my child’s education! Can’t they see this is their children’s future these uber-wealthy plutocrats are messing with? How much more money do they need? Our tax dollars should go to education our children the best way WE see fit.
As my mother, another educator, said to me last week “Our Norwegian ancestors didn’t leave Norway because they didn’t love Norway, they left for their childrens’ sake” and at that she suggest I look into Canada for my grandchildren’s sake.
One of the reasons schools don’t have bandwidth is that the telecom industry is blocking it from extending into rural areas and uninterested in expanding it into communities that have high poverty rates. Why? Because it isn’t profitable. Bandwidth SHOULD be like electricity is today… but instead its like electricity used to be at the turn of the LAST before the government intervened… so the telecom industry is effectively blocking the testing industry: watch out, Pearson and Comcast will be merging soon!
Hi Wgersen,
Thank you for that comment. That is good information to have.