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My 4 year old comes home from her third day of kinder (which is her 3rd day of public schooling ever) and says: “I failed the gym test today. I didn’t know any of the answers.” She can’t read yet mind you. #
Who do you think is getting a call on Friday morning? Followed by nasty emails to the Superintendent, our Regent, Roger TIlles, and new NYSED Commish Elia. This only strengthens my resolve to fight the madness that is NYS public elementary school testing. We fought this for the last few years to prevent this; to prevent our youngest from being exposed to high stakes tests used to evaluate her teacher BEFORE she can even read. Make a 4 year old unease on her third day. Who does this?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The madness will continue as long as anti-educators dictate education policy.
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I can’t understand why more parents aren’t speaking out about this early testing.
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Please speak loudly against this and get others to join you. It is the only way it will be stoppd.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/27/kindergarten-teachers-fear-testing-my-students-into-failure/
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Why do kindergarteners know how to use a touch screen? And why are they used to using their parents’ phones (according to the article)?
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Ridiculous to test 4-yr-olds like this, outrageous, abusive, mean. Keep fighting it with the rest of us.
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This from the smartest economist I know– a possible explanation for the Chaos Theory that has engulfed education policy to an absurd extreme
Remember Emile Dupuit’s astute observation of the French rail system in 1849:
“It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich … And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous”.
more: http://bit.ly/9OhJpV
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Thanks, for the quote. It provides history for what is occurring to passengers, in the nickel and diming of the airlines, today.
Current Influential economists, with a few exceptions, “know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”
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So true …
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How is it possible to FAIL an evaluative test????????????????????????
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I don’t know, but my senior son’s math class managed to do that. He got a low score on a pretest. It’s a pretest, so it shouldn’t matter, right? WRONG! It’s a score on his grade. He’s failing math because he didn’t do well on the pretest. Welcome to test-based “accountability” today.
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“Who does this?” Answer- Politicians seeking favor from soulless men and women, who are trying to get rich off of children.
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“Who does this?” Idiots.
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Why is a 4 yr old I kindergarten? And yes it’s absurd to test these very young kids!
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Because the cutoff in NYC is December 31. That’s right – 3 year olds in Pre-K and 4 year olds in Kindergarten. And, the DOE will not allow parents to hold kids back. I know a family with a child born 7 weeks premature (due date Jan, born in Dec) with multiple birth defects. The child spent her entire first year of her life in the hospital yet the DOE insisted she start kindergarten at the age of four!
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Until parents start banging down the doors of their elected officials and teachers refuse to administer this crap, we are going to continue down this road.
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Emile Depuit may have been right about French rail system directors not wanting to hurt the poor, but I believe the Gates, Waltons, Broads, and their edupreneur allies have a contempt for the poor upon whom they perpetrate their abuse. They believe they are stupid or else they would be rich and so cannot be trusted to be part of the decision-making in a democracy. There is also the possibility that if they were, they might opt for a more egalitarian economy.
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“’I failed the gym test today. I didn’t know any of the answers.’ She can’t read yet mind you.”
I have a feeling that this might be an unpopular point of view, but I’m going to throw a few things out there, first being that her daughter is four and I’m fairly certain that no one told her that she “failed” anything. She’s four.
Do we really know that someone asked her to read on her first day of Kindergarten? Also, what is a “gym test?”
It makes sense to do some testing of incoming K students, such as a phonemic awareness screening, to get a baseline. We’re not against that, are we?
“Who do you think is getting a call on Friday morning? Followed by nasty emails to the Superintendent, our Regent, Roger TIlles, and new NYSED Commish Elia.”
Great. I’m glad we’re going straight to Defcon Five.
We don’t even know what this “test” was. Can we please not jump to conclusions?
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I don’t know what tests were given in this case. I can say that this is going on in every grade. Students are given a test in the beginning of the year in all classes. They are tested on material they have never learned, so they fail the test. At the end of the year, they are given another test to see what they have learned. This is supposed to tell us how well the TEACHER has taught the material. It’s called a Student Learning Outcome (SLO) and it is part of the TEACHER’S evaluation.
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What a memorable experience! Her first contact with public education is FAILURE! We need parents to revolt and refuse to allow their children to be poked and prodded by data miners. Children deserve better than this.
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Let me tell you what a gym test is… PE teachers are forced to stop classes and give ALL students written tests…yes.. written. At my school the PE teacher came into the classrooms and placed a multiple choice test on the visualizer for all students who are reading age. For the younger children… the questions were read to them and they looked at pictures. Absurd. Then again common core expects early childhood aged students to analyze… that is equally absurd.
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I teach kindergarten and of course I need to know what my students know. I do ongoing assessments throughout the year and am able to assess their knowledge and skills without them knowing. I never make them feel like they failed. They learn through play and exploration, as well as through direct instruction. You can’t fail play!
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I agree with you Bethany. I don’t know enough about what happened to get angry. I think this situation, whatever it is, was very poorly explained in the post.
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It’s obviously bad to use these types of tests to judge teacher performance, but a screening at the beginning of the year to find out what knowledge and skills students are entering with is a good idea. The important thing is if it is a decision made by the teacher in order to plan instruction.
As you said, we don’t know what test was given to this student, and it sounds like we are relying on a four year old for our information here. I don’t see any reason to assume that it was a test used to punish teachers. Maybe it was F&P? That is what teachers use at my site, and it is very helpful.
Who knows what test this student was given, but as a parent, I would respect my child’s teacher enough to ask before I sent a nasty letter to the Superintendent.
I simply wish the original post had given more information.
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These types of tests are definitely not a good idea. They are extremely flawed and only serve to frustrate, fail, and label. In MA, my son was “screened” for public kindergarten in the spring, about two months before he turned 5. We walked into the school building and I had to immediately hand him off to a stranger. At least one kid was crying. After the screening, he came to find me in one of the kindergarten classrooms and looked bewildered, asking “Where are all the Legos?” He did manage to find one rickety old wooden truck and played with that while the principal addressed the parents. The student council members who are 9 and 10 year old 4th and 5th graders came in to talk to the incoming K parents about the school and within minutes started talking about how horrible the MCAS tests are and how much they hate them! I think the principal was horrified but I was glad for their honesty and hoped other parents took it to heart. Fast forward a few weeks and the principal called me in to discuss my son’s screening. He had refused to comply with most of what was asked so they could not get a read on him, yet instead of noting that they labeled him in the bottom 1%! I have early childhood education and work experience plus he is my third son so I had to take a deep breath and hold my tongue. Other parents may have freaked out, been angry or extremely worried. The principal told me about the “record number” of families who are choosing to wait until their kids are six for kindergarten. I was polite but said that I know my son and I know child development. He is 4! He was with a stranger in a strange, intimidating setting! He’s been home with me, not in school. He’s doing things on his is own like reading to himself, sounding out words, exploring his favorite topics like outer space, counting, building and creating, climbing and playing, he’s extremely outgoing and social with adults and other kids etc. Bottom 1%, my foot! These “screenings” and standardized tests of our youngest learners are useless and even harmful.
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They are quick to put kids in a lower bracket, they know by the end of the year when he is comfortable , he will do much better. He will be charted as having exceptional growth in there “stellar” program. It’s all about data, not about children and their needs.
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She was tested – not the same as an informal screening. A test given to a four year old to see where she is in the beginning of the year. She will be tested again at the end of the year to see “how much value the teacher has added to students learning.” She will then be tested again in this manner in first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, and in all the grades for all the subjects. We do not need to know if this 4 year old accurately described the assessment because we know the testing regime. Now do you understand? IT IS ABOUT TEACHER EVALUATION WITHOUT REGARD TO HOW IT IMPACTS CHILDREN.
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It is a test to punish teachers. Last year 20% of my appr came from growth on SLO. My district gave them in September and then in June. JUNE! My kids were burned out by then from all the testing. I had more than a few finish in 10 minutes. This certainly is punishing teachers.
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Opt-out…
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AMEN … OPT OUT!
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http://unitedoptout.com/
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Should the 4 year old be tested?
Of course! How else could a parent know if their 4 year old is on track for college? How else could a parent know if their 4 year old will be ready for a career?
Sarcasm off.
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My upstate District requires all 4 year olds in UPK take the (computer based) STAR early Literacy test 3 times during the school year. They send a bus to community based preschools to bus these kids in to sit in the computer lab and take this test. I turned down a $18,000 grant to opt my preschoolers out. Kids before money.
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This is so sad
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This fustercluck was initiated by NCLB waiver plan/RTTT. The federal requirement to use Common Core aligned tests for teacher evaluations was a component of the waiver plan that raised one very large, bright red flag: What about the 70% of teachers that do not teach math and ELA in grades 3 to 8????? Well the both options were equally flawed. Option #1 – tie all teachers to the math and ELA scores, thus having teachers being evaluated on the scores of student/subjects that they do not teach. Option #2 was to require all teachers of “non-tested” subjects to write their own pre-tests and post tests that would be used to show “student growth”.
So here we are in September 2015 and here in NY virtually every student (K-12) starts the year by taking their pre-test. So in order to evaluate the Kindergarten phys ed teacher, the NYSED wants to know what 4 year old children know about the subject.
At this point some of you are shaking your heads in disbelief. But I shot you nit.
One of the serious inequities is that the teachers in tested subjects (math and ELA grades 3 to 8) must use Pearson developed Common Core tests that are designed to produce excessive failure; test that they cannot see or discuss. The teachers of non-tested subjects get use reasonable and sometimes unreasonably easy post tests that they can “review” for in very “precise” ways.
Its obvious that the NCLB waiver plan had one very big hole in the teacher evaluation via test score piece. The feds either didn’t care or didn’t know this would happen – either excuse is unacceptable. And so, four year old Kindergarteners come home thinking they failed a gym test because they couldn’t read it not realizing that it is a test they have to fail so that the phys ed teacher can show the state that they are “effective”.
None of this has anything to do with better teaching and better learning or the quality of the K to 12 experience. Its all about gotcha politics and the continued assault on public education and the raping and pillaging of taxpayer dollars.
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