Gail Robinson has written a stunning article about the impact of the test score collapse in New York City.
She begins by reminding us that students in New York City have been told for a decade that what matters most for their future and their schools is their test scores. They have done test prep, test prep, test prep, because the scores are so important. Nothing else matters so much to their future–their ability to be promoted to the next grade, to graduate, to go to college, to have a decent life–as test scores.
Test scores define the person. Test scores define the school. Test scores define life.
This is her opening:
“Energy and optimism burst out of the 2011 video [view below] by students at Young Women’s Leadership School in Brooklyn. Dancing and singing to the tune of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” they proclaim, “Test prep goes on and on and on….I am brilliant. I have confidence. Gonna ace these tests.”
“This month, many city students will see such optimism ebb when they learn how they scored on the state’s standardized reading and math tests. At Brooklyn’s Young Women’s Leadership, for example, only 24 percent scored well enough to be viewed as “passing” the English test, with less than 15 percent passing the math exam. In the first tests tied to the new Common Core standards, other schools, particularly in poorer parts of the five boroughs or with high percentages of black and Latino students, had similar results.”
What do you tell the students? You are not brilliant after all? All your efforts were in vain? You failed. No matter how hard you tried, no matter how often you did test prep, you failed. You failed.
Now city and state officials say, tell them the scores don’t matter all that much. All that stuff that said last spring, last year, and for the years before; forget about it. But we know–the kids know, the teachers know, the principal knows–that this isn’t true.
Why lie to them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I always told my 4th graders that it didn’t really matter, that they should do their best and be glad when it is over. There are always 2-3 who don’t really try. But that is how it goes. We aren’t allowed to coax them to work during the test. No talking. But they have done well so far. Next spring will be different when all the computerized tests begin. I believe even 1st graders are taking tests on computers.
I have a rising 5th and a rising 6th grader. My concern is that schools are doing so much test prep that there is no time left for actual learning. When does this “silly season” of endless test prep end?
It won’t end until parents rise up and make it end.
Forget your school board–threaten the incumbency of your state and federal reps as Texas parents have started to do to stop the testing.
But we have been lying to them. The 2011 video was a lie. The pep rallies were lies and the tee shirts, the bumper stickers, the banners hanging in the cafeterias and the wrist bracelets. Are you kidding? The lie is the complicity with these tests, over time, which we’ve disguised as curriculum. The lie is the departure from the true,deep mission of free public schools into some diminishing territory of testing, sorting, stratifying, segregating and surrendering to something we know in our bones is wrong.
Amen.
I tried to go to the original article but I’m getting a “I can’t find that page” error. I’ll try the video…
I taught 9th grade high school in the Bronx for two years (2007-8) and I can tell you that out of a class of 30 Latino and black kids about 1/3 could decode text. Of the 2/3 who could decode, about 1/3 of them could actually understand what they read. I often wondered how they passed the ELA (They were 2s.) and got promoted. Those were the years when Bloomberg was crowing about test scores and closing the achievement gap. Each year we started with about five 9th grade classes of 30 kids. By senior year, we had about 2 class of 30 kids. We boasted a 90% graduation rate. For those of us who have been working in Bloomberg’s schools for the last 10 years, the common core test results and the widening achievement gap are not surprises.
My child is something of a natural conservative – a bit risk averse, into rules and procedures, highly deferential to authorities. She’s the sort of child that traditionally loves school and does well there.
Part of our home “test prep” practice has been to try to help her along to a more cynical attitude about the tests.
We started validating her own observations about the arbitrary and unnecessarily tricky nature of the questions, and the clumsiness of the essay prompts in the practice tests. Since then she has been much more relaxed about the whole thing and has found a good balance between doing the best she can – because in NYC scores are high stakes for individual students – and not worrying/caring about the outcome.
Along the way, however, something has been lost that I wish she could have held onto a bit longer. She can no longer afford to see school as completely aligned with her own interests. Either they are complicit in the madness (the teachers are sort of required to cheerlead) or they are victims of it themselves. Either way the concept of school as benevolent authority has been a bit eroded in her mind.
“Part of our home “test prep” practice has been to try to help her along to a more cynical attitude about the tests.”
Sad that it’s come to that, isn’t it? But, unfortunately, so necessary. Your post is heartwrenching. Whoever thought it would come to parents telling their kids not to take “school” so seriously? (Yes, I know I’m conflating school with tests – unfortunately that’s becoming the norm.)
Another example of test prep absurdity:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dcs-jefferson-middle-school-rocked-that-cas/2013/08/08/3109700c-fea2-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html
Although I typically would just get a quick laugh out of it, this school’s apparent success has prompted my own school’s administration to “encourage” our faculty to embrace a similar “attack” in improving next year’s DC-CAS scores.
The teacher obviously has an impressive ability to connect with kids and should be somebody who continues with teaching. However, I would be infuriated if I had a child and his teacher spent so much time hyping a ridiculous test with no importance to anyone but to those of us who fear losing our jobs and to those who are to gain financially.
Somebody out there should write an article entitled: “How political and media-bred hatred for teachers and their unions led to the development of a cynical, narrow, unproductive, boring, anxious and loathsome learning environment for students”.
These students are really cute and their performance is terrific. But a test prep act about test prep? I don’t know. I find all the assemblies devoted to cheerleading for test takers, test prep and testing rather disturbing. None of that was necessary back in the days when tests were low stakes.
Catchy songs with dances like this tend to get passed along to the next groups of kids in successive years. I hope the instruction that students received in music and dance consisted of a lot more than just this, especially since it engendered false hopes and hyped a terrible lie, as if their hard work would count for something, when all along the state was setting them up to fail. What a horrible disappointment it must be. So sad the adults in power have done this to them.
My mother had come to help in my classroom one day when we had to show a video cheering on testing. It was from You Tube and titled, “I’m smart and I know it.” My students, my mother and myself were all disgusted by the video. It was so cheesy and so stupid to have an entire faculty make a pro-standardized test video. We all knew the video was a waste of time. Fortunately, it was only about 5 minutes. I can’t imagine how bad it must be to do that stuff more frequently.
If you type in test prep in the search box of inside schools a reference to the article comes up with this URL, but you can’t get to the article. “Test Prep Didn’t Prevent Score Drop” insideschools.org/blog/…/1000706-test-prep-didnt-prevent-score-drop. Same thing on other places where the article shows up in a google search. COWARDS!
Here’s the google cache thanks to John Awbrey. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-6TUjmZrOUYJ:insideschools.org/blog/item/1000706-test-prep-didnt-prevent-score-drop+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a