I received this sensible email from Melissa McMullan, who teaches sixth grade students on Long Island in New York State.
I am a sixth grade teacher in Comsewogue School District, Port Jefferson Station, NY. I have a PhD in Literacy Studies from Hofstra University. You have previously published my writing on your blog as it pertains to 3-8 testing and APPR. This year it is imperative that the state suspend both so schools can focus on meeting the myriad of students needs in the face of this pandemic.
I want to begin by sharing what I see every day when I go to work. Having been a teacher for 20 years, I see the worst teacher I have ever seen. Every day I judge my performance based upon what I know makes a good teacher. I see little to no evidence of a strong teacher performance based upon existing metrics, and what I know are standards of good practice.
This is a heavy burden to carry. I remind myself I am teaching in the middle of a pandemic. I am working in a classroom that is not my own. All of the materials I rely upon to do my job effectively, are outside, locked up in a trailer. I can’t do the collaborative work that has always benefited students. I am teaching an additional subject, one I have never taught before. We try not to handle students’ papers. I do not have the hundreds of novels and picture books we traverse in a “normal” year. Every lesson must be constructed in a way that ensures there is no shared touching of materials.
There is a bright side. Students have yoga mats. We go outside to do work. We are experimenting with modes to collaborate, while maintaining the appropriate distance. We are developing ways to have class conversations where we can hear one another through our masks. I am working hard every day to reinvent myself as a teacher in order to teach in these times.
Little I am doing is anything I have ever done before. And I am one of the lucky ones. I only had to learn one additional subject this year. Some of my colleagues have had to learn five. I am assigned to the same grade level I’ve been with throughout my career, while many of my colleagues are not. I am in the same building, while many of my colleagues have been relocated. I teach in one room, the majority of my colleagues are travelling room to room every period, with only the most essential items from their classrooms crammed on carts that move with them.
There is an undeniable level of stress every day. We are teaching in a foreign landscape, while monitoring masks and distance and how long it’s been since our students have had a break. We watch as our custodial staff travels throughout the building with backpacks and respirators spraying disinfectant on the surfaces we touch. Every day, students exhibit COVID-type symptoms of sneezing and/or runny noses. We have to determine, while teaching, whether their symptoms require a trip to our auxiliary nurse to be triaged. There is the “Do Not Enter” list, that has to be checked every day, containing names of students we cannot permit in our classrooms until they are cleared by the nurse.
Everyone, at every level of public education, is doing everything in his or her power to continue to educate children, in the safest manner possible. I own my failure this year. I cannot measure up to pre-pandemic instructional standards. Nor can colleagues who have been shuffled around classrooms, buildings, subjects and grade levels to maintain appropriate social distancing in classrooms, amid a frightening and stressful teaching environment. Every ounce of energy we have is expended standing in front of our students every day with a smile (while wearing a mask), projecting a sense of calm, kindness and love, while simultaneously finding any way humanly possible to teach in this situation.
New York State must suspend its three through eight high stakes testing schedule, as well as its teachers’ Annual Professional performance review (APPR). Both endeavors carry with them an inordinate level of stress, and costs in both materials and manpower, while having no ability to assess what students and teachers should be evaluated for this year. If New York State is unable to relinquish these tasks, I respectfully ask that both my students and I be registered as failures, so we can move on and use our time, energy and resources for devising ways to succeed in this environment.
I tell students we are a part of history. We are in school in the middle of a pandemic. Forever we will be judged by how well we took care of one another. Measure that.
Melissa McMullan, PhD
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Suspend TESTING and WATCH kids FLOURISH.
I agree 100%. But, in our district, the vast majority of families refuse the test each year. But teachers and administrators cannot refuse the APPR process which costs us innumerable amounts of time and money for an evaluation process that has no relationship to the work we are doing with children, and in particular, meeting students’ needs.
The results on November 3rd will determine who sets education policy, a Biden appointed Secty of Education will be sensitive to students and teachers.
States cannot refuse to give federally required tests w/o jeopardizing Title 1 funding
Peter, my advice would be to urge states to refuse to give the federally mandated tests if there is no waiver.
To give high-stakes tests in the midst of a pandemic is madness and cruelty and sadism.
No administration has ever withheld Title I funding from states because of their defiance to stupid mandates.
Biden administration will not. Betsy DeVos would.
a correct word: madness. The madness of greed.
Batsy already stated there will be no waivers this year. She must have a stake in the testing companies.
Families can refuse participation in federally mandated tests. Districts need to look at what the cost of implementing standardized tests truly is, versus the value of funding tied to it. But that still leaves the elephant in the room… is there any value for students in the time, energy, money and effort required to administer these assessments?
My ESL position was always partly Title 1 funded. At first, I had to give an ESL test to justify funding. By the time I retired thirty years or so later, I was sacrificing twenty-eight teaching mornings for testing as my ELL students were required to take a whole host of new standardized tests. The absurd amount of testing took on a life of its own that didn’t benefit students one iota. Testing became an impediment to learning.
I see this in my own building with our ELL students and their teachers. When you consider the 180 school year, losing a minimum of twenty-eight days for testing that offers no value to the students being assessed is not rational. What deeply concerns me is the disparate impact these mandated tests have on students who need public education the most. The more affluent a student’s family is, the less impact these assessments have on a student.
As a long-time Democrat and Obama-Biden supporter, I was VERY disappointed with Obama’s Sec. of Ed. and their education policies. This writer is correct, that we should suspend these testing policies–but we should end them, not suspend. In America, we should stop superimposing standardized tests from outside the classroom. They are almost all destructive. America’s schools were mostly better before we got them. They are ultimately designed to make every child in America dance to the same tune!
I agree! End the reign of standardized testing! We became the greatest nation in the world before the advent of mass-produced standardized tests imposed by Washington.
I agree wholeheartedly. I have been deeply disappointed by the Democrats’ inability to act on behalf of students. It is all about the money. There is a tremendous amount of money in these assessments. The lobbyists for the publishers keep this money train moving, to the detriment of the very people they pretend to help.
Melissa McMullan should consider herself and her students not as failures but as works in progress, teaching both her and especially her students adaptive behavior in an environmental challenge, differing from any they’ve seen before, and quite likely to be repeated.
“She was my favorite teacher” will bang off the walls of every turn of their lives.
It is a dichotomy. What makes me a good teacher is my willingness to fail, and expose my failures to my students, so they feel safe doing the same. But that is no small task.
Tests are necessary! Without them how would we know that poverty is bad?
I would like to expand this conversation to not only include the testing of K-12 students but also to look at the pedagogy testing (PPAT and EdTPA) required by many states in order for teacher candidates to obtain a teaching license. The same questions and concerns voiced here apply to Educator Preparation Programs and student-teacher candidates.
I could not agree more. At the heart of this conversation is the fact that people can simply not be standardized. I worked with a new teacher last year, trying over and over to help her pass the EdTPA. Me, with 20 years of teaching experience, could not help her pass. She is intelligent, compassionate and innovative. She is everything a student would need in a teacher. We finally had to bypass the system and pass through alternative means. I was livid about the time, energy and money invested in an activity that once again, offered no return on investment for students.
We have “testing” due to the diligence of a wide range of civil rights organizations, who argue, w/o testing the poorest kids, kids learning English, kids with disabilities will be ignored, and, governments ask: are our dollars making a difference?
The civil rights organizations who promote testing are part of the problem as are the elected “government” officials, especially at the federal level, who think standardized test scores are the only and best way to judge whether our tax dollars are being spent equitably and with results that matter for the wellbeing of individual students.
The civil rights groups that support testing are coincidentally funded by Gates.
And given that flimsy rationale, after decades of testing — do our dollars make a difference? Yes, of course they do. Look at how much money the test publishers and privateers are making.
Testing goes in the thoughtless way that many stupid habits go on: “We’ve always done it that way.”
The results of your question have been answered by NAEP: our dollars are not making a difference.
The biggest crime is the disparate impact that federally mandated assessments have on our students who rely most heavily on public education to be an equalizer. Anecdotal data suggests that school districts with the greatest percentage of students receiving free/reduced lunches have programmatic instruction (often created by the very same people creating the assessments). The result is curriculum and assessments tied to policy, and not the diverse needs of students. Curriculum, to be effective, needs to be based upon the needs of students in the classroom, their interests, cultures, languages and experiences. Students in affluent districts are more likely to experience this because there is less reliance on standardized curriculum and significantly greater parental refusal of standardized tests.
Seeing civil rights organizations as “enemies” is not a fruitful strategy. how can we work work with these organization to assure adequate targeted funding as well as a comprehensive strategy that goes beyond education…. do we support “culturally relevant sustaining education?”
I know, challenging, we cannot be seen as white elites deciding how children of color should be educated …. we must figure out how to work together ….
Civil rights organizations do great work and I contribute to them.
They are not my “enemies.”
But traditionally they opposed standardized testing because they know that it hurts the children and families they represent.
So why do you think they lobby as a group to continue the punitive and ineffective federal testing mandate?
My guess — no, I’ve heard it expressed — is that they are objective ways to evaluate students, rather than leaving them to the judgment and low expectations of biased (i.e. white) teachers. So they choose testing — the better option, even though it is still a poison.
Civil rights groups are not clamoring for testing. In fact, most civil rights groups acknowledge the inherent bias in standardized testing. It’s billionaires like Gates that are interested in testing and the testing companies that make lots of money from the sale of tests, scoring and monetizing data that are the leading proponents.
I could not agree more. I am working with a group of teachers in my district to privilege voices that are often not heard. The best we can do as white people, especially in education, is use our power to elevate the voices of others, not continue to be the oppressors by speaking over them.
Civil Rights organizations were the driving force behind requiring testing in Every School Succeeds Act (ESSA), Wade Henderson was their spokesperson.. his testimony
was determinant, Weingarten supported testing every third year, w/o success.
Peter,
Those who supported annual testing really should examine the evidence. Test scores stopped rising a decade ago. The lowest performing kids fell farther behind. Achievement gaps are stagnant. Why maintain a failed and punitive policy? It hurts most the very kids it claims to help.
You don’t help students by closing their school.
Scores started to decline ten years after the beginning of so-called reform and the disinvestment in public education. “Reform” has done less than nothing to improve schools.
The reason they want to continue testing during a pandemic is that they want to use the pandemic test scores to close and privatize public schools. Period. That’s the only reason. Stef Feldman said so aloud, on record, said they want to identify failing schools. They want to close schools. They also say they want to help teachers, to inform instruction; they know they’re lying about that. They know that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s all about privatization. The testing nuts, they can’t hide, we can see their greedy side.
Was Stef Feldman ever a teacher? TFA? Never?
Yes, I agree. Much of this is about the privatization of public education. There is absolutely nothing in high stakes testing that helps teachers, nor students, nor informs instruction. That is pure nonsense they use to sell their “product” that is weaponized against students and teachers.