Testing Troubles

Year's end sees little information on how students are doing, but lots of talk about too many standardized tests

For all the time and money spent on testing in Santa Fe’s schools, teachers say the results come so late and include so little information that half of their promised purpose—to guide instruction—is rendered useless. Increasingly, the exams seem out of place when held up against the real world.

"What does this have to do with improving community or climate change or poverty or all of those things that this generation of kids are inheriting?" one high school English teacher asks. (Names have been withheld out of lingering concerns among district employees, despite the New Mexico Public Education Department recently backing down from a gag order prohibiting teachers and staff from speaking out against tests.)

"Imagine a standardized test where the one question is, and it's a couple pages, 'How can you improve your neighborhood?' Or 'Give me some causes, effects and solutions for climate change?' Or 'How can you stop heroin in Northern New Mexico?' And imagine if we taught to that test," she says. "What if our tests really changed what I think is the keystone of society—education. And the tests can dictate that, because they're dictating everything else right now."

Instead, she spent 32 days this year, 30 percent of her time, on tests she's not convinced help her students and certainly don't inform her instruction.

Each year, Santa Fe schools administer tests mandated by the state and federal government, the school district, individual schools and college admissions. The schedule for testing starts with Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), and its Spanish-language counterpart, for K-3 on the very first day of school. Discovery Education Assessment (DEA) tests on math, reading, algebra, geometry and biology follow just weeks after, and again multiple times throughout the year. Those pursuing college will also likely take PSAT, SAT and/or ACT exams in the fall. Semester's end brings End of Course (EoC) exams in varied subjects from reading and writing to math, science and social studies, as well as electives such as physical education and music. Spring brings the Standards Based Assessment (SBA) science exam, and the Pearson Education-crafted Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). There's a test on the calendar every month of the school year, though not every test applies to every student.

"We have to follow the laws, … [and] the bulk of where we're at is required," says Richard Bowman, chief information and strategy officer for Santa Fe Public Schools. "Our board and leadership team do believe the use of standardized tests has gone too far and is not appropriate in certain areas, but we're not going to break the law."

For PARCC tests, administered in 2015 for the first time, results came six months later, after students had transitioned to the next grade level. While that schedule is expected to speed up, results will still come out in the summer, after kids have moved on.

"I personally, and many of my colleagues, don't feel like any of these standardized tests do anything to inform our teaching," says one third grade teacher. "They say it's to guide instruction and for schools and teachers to improve their teaching. No one I know really buys that. It's about politics. It's about Pearson making money off these tests. There are a lot of people who stand to gain a lot from these standardized tests, but it's not the teachers and students. In fact, we're losing."

Losing instructional time, for one thing, but she also sees the anxiety of so much testing taking a toll even on her highest performing kids—9-year-olds so small their feet dangle and swing from their chairs while they hunch over their Chromebooks, furiously working away. It left her wondering, "Why are we doing this to them?"

Kids are going to learn and do things at different speeds, she adds: "They're not robots. They're not all the same, but they're assessed as if they should be the same. That's not respecting their strengths."

"When you're teaching the most underserved group of kids who are really dealing with that incredible disparity that Santa Fe is, these tests are just the most disabling in terms of the spirit and intellect and empowerment," the high school teacher adds.

Last year, tests meant she didn't see her juniors for three weeks, and project-based learning programs that had them in the midst of building an aquaponics lab, a solar sound studio and a tiny home all died while students were away testing. Derailed and disheartened, students didn't complete any of those projects. Even bringing poet Jimmy Santiago Baca to speak to the students could barely be fit in around the testing schedule. For all that, the results their teachers received amounted to a spreadsheet that included students' names, subjects and a score.

But educator feedback isn't what PARCC is even designed to give, Bowman says.

"It's accountability for the federal government, passed through the state, about our education dollars," he says. "The teachers are not the primary consumers of some of that data."

Juniors who opted out of PARCC last year, as hundreds did in the high schools, were informed this year that to graduate, they would have to at least attempt the test.

"It turned out their opting-out was not really an opt-out, so it was being held against them," the high school teacher says.

While this year's seniors had only to take the test, in years to come, students will have to demonstrate proficiency to graduate.

On the student end, more than a little discontent has come out, an issue Santa Fe High School salutatorian Carley Cook called out in her graduation speech.

"We are more than our scores," Cook said. "Every one of the many different standardized tests that we have taken has failed to measure our creativity, collaboration, passion or abilities to problem solve. They have labeled us 'below proficiency,' 'nearing proficiency,' 'proficient' or 'advanced,' but these labels fail to understand the whole student.

"Perhaps if we had not labeled our students so much so soon, our graduating class would be larger."

In April, Cook organized a panel about testing, which featured Jesse Hagopian, author of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.

In her own education, she's seen PARCC take six classes away from her AP English class, and her AP government class was forced to practice close reading, a time-consuming way to analyze a text that she says distracted from the material for a college-level class. Some of her classmates had been told to not expect to see the scores for tests they took as sophomores until they're seniors.

"In this way, they're kind of strong-arming the students into continuing to take these tests," she says. "Students don't receive enough information about their scores in a timely fashion, or sometimes at all, in order to inform themselves about what they need to be working on. It doesn't really come back to the students after they take the exam."

Nationwide conversations touch on the need to allow our educational model to evolve with the changing times, to adjust from a memorization and regurgitation model, now that so much information is readily available in the computer we carry in our pockets. Whether standardized tests can even be revised to fit and allow for that kind of approach to education remains to be debated. Santa Fe Superintendent Joel Boyd at least participated in these talks at a March screening of Most Likely to Succeed, a film that criticizes modern schools as behind the times.

"We are still working with a 125-year-old school model that was specifically designed to crush creativity and innovation out of kids," producer Ted Dintersmith told SFR ahead of that screening. "Instead of having the courage and vision to reimagine school as we moved from manufacturing and innovation, we somewhat bafflingly decided the answer is to test more frequently. The very skills our students need are getting crushed out of them, and the things they're being rewarded for are the things machines can do better."

The Network for Public Education released a video earlier this year in which the nonprofit education advocacy group's founder, Diana Ravitch, a historian and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, explains why the former Education Department employee has since abandoned support of test-based school reform. These tests provide "no useful information," Ravitch says, calling on parents to opt-out as a way of communicating to policymakers that they don't support this program.

The US Department of Education responded to growing opt-outs by issuing more than a dozen letters to states where opt-outs were reported, warning those states of possible sanctions if fewer than 95 percent of students take the tests.

Hagopian, who spoke in Santa Fe in April as part of the panel that Cook organized, has pointed out that we're living through the period in US history of the greatest income inequality ever, and facing perpetual wars, mass incarceration, climate change—all problems that can't be solved by filling in the right bubbles.

"We have to teach critical thinking and creativity, imagination and courage and leadership and empathy and curiosity, not simply because it'll help stop the students in my history class from falling asleep and drooling on the desk," he said in a TEDx talk earlier this year, "but because I believe the fate of our society depends on it."

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