A reader in Florida describes how she was transformed from a librarian to a test supervisor:
Dear Diane,
I’m a library media specialist in Florida and have taught for 25 years. In those years I have experienced the degeneration of school library media programs which has accelerated with the advent of Race to the Top. With “testing season” upon us, the school media center will be closed to book checkout, research, information literacy lessons, enrichment activities, etc. and I will become a test administrator for weeks at a time. School-wide, instruction will come to a halt. Students will be regrouped into “testing groups” and very quietly marched in and out of the library and computer labs for long sessions of testing. Even the most behaviorally challenging students know the drill and march to the testing orders. It’s scary how compliant they are. If nothing else, we have taught our children how to take a test – not pass a test, because we already know a high percentage will fail thanks to the arbitrarily set cut scores – but they have been taught since 2nd grade (and now Kindergarten) how to BEHAVE during a test. Is this our educational legacy?
The most distressing aspect of becoming a robotic, script-reading test administrator in a high poverty school is seeing the resignation to failure on the faces of many of our students. They know they’re going to “fail”; they fail every year. The year we switched from FCAT to FSA (Common Core), I told my students, “Congratulations, you’ll never have to take another FCAT test again.” They cheered. Then I told them the bad news – that the new tests will be longer and harder and on the computer. One girl asked, “Why they going to make us take a harder test when we can’t pass this one?” A good question and one I could not answer.
This year, during the FSA Writing Assessment, a student raised her hand and asked, “What are they asking me?” I told her I couldn’t help her with that. I suggested she go back and reread the prompt. She was a very low level reader and the article on which prompt was based was too hard for her. She knew it, I knew it, her reading teacher knew it. Her teachers know because they work with her every day, so how does taking this test help her in any way? She raised her hand again, “How am I supposed to answer when I don’t know what they’re asking.” I encouraged her to try. At that point, she huffed, turned off her monitor, and put her head down. She didn’t realize it, but she had opted-out.
What are we doing to a generation of students who are repeatedly being told they’re failures? How do these tests inform the people that can actually help them with their academic or emotional needs? (And the emotional needs are great and must be met before meaningful academic progress can be made. No standardized test can address this.) They don’t inform, they label. Parents and teachers know from working with their children on a daily basis the needs of the child, so who benefits from the massive amounts of data the tests are producing? When I think of the money one district alone, even one school alone, must spend on computers, tests and materials aligned to the tests – new tests mean new textbooks, hardware and software – I believe the answer is obvious. Hint: It’s not the kids.
I’ve become so disheartened by billionaire reformers meddling in public education and the trend toward privatization that I’ll be attending NPE’s conference in Raleigh next month. I’m looking forward to seeing you and meeting others that are trying to push back against reforms that are hurting our children.
Anna Thoma
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Her school library is open?! Ours has been closed for about five years.
A clear account of the intentional damage being done to students by the testing industry. Add the theft of professional time from the proper work of the school librarian, and the preemptive use for testing only of the dedicated space, equipment, and resources that should be devoted to learning.
Multiply these damages across all schools where this is happening and a very high proportion of students who are put into an unnecessary state of despair about their abilities.
This is not just theft of time, property, and professional expertise on a grand scale but also a demonstration of forced educational malpractice and large scale bullying authorized by state officials and backed by billionaires.
Hang in there, Anna, and as another FL teacher caught in the testing quagmire, I look forward to meeting you at the NPE Conference!
It’s affirming to read other teachers’ accounts of how testing actually affects students and teachers. It’s easy to get lost in heady debates about testing and accountability and pedagogy and policy… But what happens on the human level?
Exactly what Anna described. I will share some of my own experiences below, because I empathize deeply with Anna’s situation.
One of the most demoralizing moments of my teaching career was being forced to do ACT prep with my secondary ESL students. We would read the questions together, trying to figure out some way of breaking it down into something manageable, and then the students would furrow their brows or just check out completely, and we would all end up frustrated. And I would think, “I’ve spent the last 7 months building a safe classroom community in which students can grow and learn and express their ideas… and then I betray all of that with this absurdity?”
Another demoralizing moment was having to administer the ACCESS test to ELLs. We had to test every single student in the bilingual program even if they weren’t actually taking bilingual or ESL classes anymore. In addition to losing class time, the bilingual department teachers gave up every prep period and lunch period for about 5 weeks to test students individually on oral proficiency. You want to know about the life cycle of the boll weevil? I could tell you. That was on the test two years in a row. One girl had literally arrived to the U.S. the weekend before and enrolled the day before the testing began, and she had to take it. She opened the booklet, flipped through the entire thing not able to answer any of the questions and looked up at me in complete bewilderment. Luckily, I speak her native language and give her some reassurance, but I felt like a failure as a teacher and an abomination of a human being.
Those experiences affected me deeply, and I wish that I had had more knowledge then. I was young and new as a teacher, and frankly, I was overwhelmed. Now, I do my best to read up on what’s going on in education (thank you, Diane, for making that task infinitely easier!), and my mantra nowadays is “opt out.” There is nothing – absolutely nothing – that those tests could tell anyone that I, as the students’ teacher, couldn’t tell them first.
My daughter, a HS junior, attends a private school for special needs students, paid for by NY State in accordance w/her IEP. She has ADHD, dyslexia, & expressive/receptive language processing disorder. Despite those challenges, she gets mostly A’s & B’s in her classwork, & in addition to the grades, her progress reports contain glowing comments from all her teachers about her motivation to learn, & class participation. She has yet to pass a single Regents exam; she’s taken the Algebra 3 times, the Global History & English exams twice each. The first time she took the Algebra Regents was the final time they were offering the non-Common Core Algebra test before switching to CC. They raised the benchmark by 1 point for that exam in order to mask the sharp increase in the failure rate they were expecting (correctly) upon the switch to Common Core. She missed passing that Algebra exam by that 1 point. Since then she’s scored within 3 points of passing the Common Core Algebra Regents. Her teacher informed us that achieved scores for the Common Core Regents were 15-20 points lower than the previous exams, so her losing only 2 points on her score actually represented a substantial improvement in her skills. Her reward for that hard work was that they jerked the bar up just beyond even her increased reach. How is this fair?
Meanwhile, in the real world: Her school has an internship program for HS seniors where they spend 1 day a week at a job internship with one of a variety of participating local employers. She just had an interview for office work with one of the employers who had several spots open – her first job interview ever. He hadn’t seen any other candidates yet, & he offered her the position on the spot immediately following the interview. Apparently she *is* prepared for employment in the real world, so exactly what is it these all-important Regents exams, which determine whether a student gets a HS diploma regardless of grades in their course work, measure?
I will be tech support and a proctor PARCC testing in my school for three weeks this spring. I am a school librarian who will probably be writing three weeks of sub plans for the substitute(s) who will run our library while I am in testing sessions. Of course this is also three weeks of instruction I will be missing for my mandatory SLO. Gee, I wonder what my data will look like for my end of year performance review?!?
Congratulations and thanks to the writer and to Laura who commented above. Horror stories like theirs need to be spread far and wide. Once the public knows what’s going on, we’ll have a chance to slay the testing giant.
You are my hero!