Teachers in my school district have been required to do an unprecedented amount of testing this year. During January I administered district benchmark tests in reading and math. Students completed a 45 minute reading assessment, and I tested all 28 of my students one-on-one with the ARI (Analytical Reading Inventory). All this was followed by a pre-test of the next math benchmark, because we are now implementing pretesting as well as post testing. It was such a relief to finally have all that behind me, and really be able to spend time helping my students to learn and build skills. At least that’s what I thought would happen.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday, I went on a tweeting rant following my grade level collaboration meeting. It was at this meeting that we were shown the charts, graphs and tables, and all the latest Data Director reports about the January tests.   We were asked to develop a “Writing to Learn” lesson and strategy, which is another district initiative,  because only 23% of my students had answered question 12 correctly on the math PRETEST, so what was I going to do to address that? And only 63% of my students were successful in being able to write using vivid descriptive language on the district writing assessment. How would I correct that?

If you aren’t familiar with Data Director, it’s the program that produces all the colorful charts and graphs that you see above, and it cost the district a reported half million dollars.  We seem to be giving tests, just so they can create this data.

Now I’ve been told that it’s time to administer Rigby Benchmarks so that I have those scores in time for parent/teacher conferences. This is another one-on-one reading test. It’s also time to give the term 4 reading and math district benchmarks.

Tests have their place.  They should be valuable tools when used as formative assessment to guide planning and instruction.  They are important when they assess mastery and provide information to the teacher, but many of the district benchmarks are poorly crafted tests that do not tell me anything I didn’t know before.  Worse than that, this onslaught of mandatory on grade level tests are defeating my special ed kids and teaching them to shut down. 

I have always considered myself to be a very creative teacher. I like to teach across the curriculum, so when we learn about the American Revolution or the Middle Ages, I do not confine that instruction to our social studies time. We read about it during reading time, we write about it during our writer’s workshop time. We read a lot of historical fiction as well as non-fiction. These are the things that get kids excited about history. They are eager to learn more. The technology that we use just enhances all of this.

This year, however, between the testing and the “Non-Negotiables”  that I wrote about earlier, I am very dissatisfied with my teaching. I feel disorganized, and disjointed. We start a project like using Edmodo to learn about the American Revolution, but it takes weeks to complete, because I have to stop and test, or complete an exercise for Writing to Learn, or I need to use the HM readers instead of other richer materials.

My kids are not complaining, but I know they are getting cheated.   Their fourth grade year should be about the joy of learning and discovery and not just about test scores.